fJass ^573 
Book 

PRESENTED BY 



VINDICATION 



fiV I S HI) LITURGY, 



HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL 



BY THK 

REV. J. W, NEYIN, I). I). 




VINDICATION 




EEVISED LITURGY, 



HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL 



HEY. J. W. NEVXN, D. D, 



PHILADELPHIA; 

JAB, B. RODGERS, PRINTER, 52 & 54 NORTH SIXTH STREET 

1867. 



ELDERS 1 REQUEST. 



Dayton, December 1, 1866. 

Rev. J. W. Nevin, D.D. 

Rev. and Dear Bro.: — 

We, the undersigned, Elders of the General Synod, being impressed with the con- 
viction, that the exhibition of the history, doctrines, and ruling spirit of the Revised 
Liturgy, presented in a tract entitled, "A History and Criticism of the Ritualistic 
Movement in the German Reformed Church, by Rev. J. H. A. Bomberger, D.D.," 
must be one-sided and unfair, and, therefore, calculated ' to do much harm in the 
Church; and desiring to have an expression of the views held by the other members 
of the Committee who prepared the Liturgy, would unite in earnestly requesting 
you to furnish us with a history of its preparation and a critical review of its merits, 
for publication. 

Very respectfully yours, 



A. B. Wingerd, Mercersburg Classis. 

D. S. Dieffenbacher, St. Paul's " 

J. Troxel, Westmoreland " 

John Zollinger, Illinois " 

Wm. A. Wilt, Zion's " 

9D. J. Craig, Westmoreland " 

Geo. P. Wiestling, Lancaster " 

W. G. King, Clarion " 

N. D. Hauer, Maryland " 

D. C. Hammond, Maryland " 

Daniel Cort, Iowa. " 

Jacob Bausman, Lancaster " 

D. B. Martin, Mercersburg " 

John Bowman, Mercersburg " 

Geo. Hill, East Susquehannah " 
Michael Brown, West Susquehanna " 

R. E. Addams, Lebanon " 

Samuel Zacharias, Zion's " 

D. Lupfer, Zion's " 
John W. Bachman, East Pennsylvania " 

John Meily, Lebanon " 



INTRODUCTION. 



The Request prefixed to this pamphlet sufficiently explains 
its occasion and object; while it is of a character also not only 
to justify, but even to demand and require its appearance. It 
is most true, that Dr. Bomberger's tract is "one-sided and un- 
fair, and therefore calculated to do much harm in the Church.' 9 
It was brought out hastily, just before the meeting of the late 
General Synod at Dayton, to serve a party purpose, and as part 
of a plan to pre-occupy the members of that body (particularly 
in the West), with a prejudice against the Revised Liturgy, 
which, it was hoped, might be sufficient to overwhelm and crush 
it before it could have a chance of coming before the people. 
It was, in this respect, like a political campaign document, let 
off on the eve of an election. for effect; and it is characterized 
throughout by the spirit of reckless misrepresentation we usually 
meet with, and expect to meet with, in publications of this sort. 
Its criticisms on the Liturgy itself do not amount to much. 
They are vague, indefinite, and loose ; turning, for the most part, 
on the use of invidious terms of reproach, and appeals to popu- 
lar prejudice. But this is only a small part of its offence. By 
far the greater part of the tract is devoted to another object 
altogether. Under the pretence of giving a history of the Lit- 
urgy, it seeks to make capital against it by trying to show that 
it is a grand fraud, which has been practised upon the Church 
by the Committee intrusted with the work of its preparation. 



6 



INTRODUCTION. 



In this view, it is an atrocious libel throughout upon the charac- 
ter of the Committee, as well as an insult to the Church at large, 
in whose service they have been working for so many years. All 
this was brought out clearly enough in the Synod at Dayton ; 
and the political bomb-shell went off there without much execu- 
tion. But the matter deserves unquestionably a still more pub- 
lic exposure. The voice of so large a portion of our Eastern 
lay delegation in attendance at Dayton deserves to be heard. 
I proceed, therefore, to the task of vindicating the Liturgy from 
the wrong that is done to it in this tract, both historically and 
theologically. The personalities which this must involve, to a 
certain extent, I should have preferred having nothing to do 
with; but I do not see how they are to be avoided. 

As just intimated, what I have to say will fall naturally into 
two general parts ; a defence of the Liturgy, or say rather of 
the movement leading to it, historically considered ; secondly, a 
defence of the Liturgy, considered in its actual theological cha- 
racter. For the second part, I will take the liberty of using an 
article I have written on this subject for the resuscitated Mer- 
cersburg Revieiv, 



\ 



f 



PART I, 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION OF THE NEW LITURGY. 

Worship, in the use of prescribed forms, is not a new thing 
in the Reformed Church. Liturgies, of some sort, have had 
place "within it from the beginning. They belonged to its church 
life in Europe, and they came over with the same church life 
to this country. At the same time, they were held to be a fair 
subject all along for change and improvement. No Liturgy was 
considered to be of perpetual force, even for the particular coun- 
try or province in which it was used; much less for other coun- 
tries. The liberty of primitive times here was practically asserted, 
as the proper liberty of the Protestant Church. ' The old Swiss 
Liturgies in this way changed. The old Liturgy of the Palatinate 
became antiquated, even in the Palatinate itself. There was a 
movement all along, in other words, towards the realization of 
something in worship, which it was felt had not been fully reached 
in existing forms. The grossly unliturgical tendencies of later 
times (Rationalistic in Germany, Methodistic in this country), 
belonged themselves to this movement. But they had no power 
to bring it to rest. They only served to urge it onward in its 
course, by deepening the sense of a want which they had no 
power to satisfy, and by causing it to be felt, that the true satis- 
faction for this want must be sought in some other way. Hence, 
among the "pious desires " of the Reformed Church in America, 
we find at work all along, very sensibly felt, the wish for a satis- 
factory Liturgy. The old Palatinate service was not satisfac- 



8 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



tory ; and none of the services brought over from Europe, during 
the last century, were satisfactory. At the same time, the deeper 
consciousness of the Church refused to settle into contentment 
with the modern innovation of totally free prayer. Such wor- 
ship had, indeed, forced itself into use on all sides ; but the true 
genius of the Church, at bottom, resented it as something foreign 
and strange; and its voice was still heard, though in more or 
less smothered accents, calling out for a Liturgy that might be 
worthy of the name. 

It was in response to this call, that the Mayer Liturgy, as it 
is called, made its appearance in 1837; the respectable work of 
a truly respectable man. But, as all know, it failed to satisfy 
the Church. Full opportunity was given for the trial of it. No- 
body thought of opposing any bar to its use. No popular pre- 
judice lay in its way; no outside jealousy stood ready to shout 
Ritualism in its face. But still it found almost no favor. Minis- 
ters and people consented in allowing it to fall well-nigh dead 
from the press. Why? "Because," says Dr.Bomberger, "it 
was unhappily not constructed after the pattern of our older 
Liturgies," and was "too much of an accommodation to the 
spirit of the times." That is, it did not please the times, be- 
cause it went too much with the times, and refused to go full 
against them, as was done soon after, Dr. B. tells us, by the re- 
actionary movement which was led off by the publication of the 
Anxious Bench in 1842. What the Doctor says, moreover, of 
its unhappy variation from our older Liturgies, is mere moon- 
shine. No following of that pattern would have helped the 
matter a particle. There the older Liturgies were; it was an 
easy thing to bring any of them into use, if the wants of the 
Church could have been satisfied in that way. But they were 
not satisfactory; the Church was all the time feeling and reach- 
ing after something better; and the Mayer Liturgy proved a 
flat failure, just because it was not something better, but the 
same thing in fact — the continuation of a mode or manner of 
worship, which it was felt the life of the Church had outgrown, 
so as to need now a different style of worship altogether. 

I well remember how Dr. Ranch used to speak of this Liturgy. 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



9 



He had no patience with its external, mechanical character; 
especially after the various tinkerings it had to undergo before 
its final adoption. A Liturgy, he used to say, in his earnest, 
genial way, should be of one cast, a single creation, ruled through- 
out by the presence of one central idea; in this respect, like a 
poem, or other true work of art. But what had we here? Dead 
forms only, bound together in a dead way ; from which it was 
vain to expect, therefore, that the breath of life should be kin- 
dled in the devotions of the sanctuary. Such a Liturgy, he 
thought, could do the Church harm only, and not good. 

Some years passed after this, before any serious movement 
was made toward getting out a better Liturgy. In the view of 
many, the matter was not held to be of any very great account. 
They were willing to abide by the system of free prayer, as it 
had place in the Presbyterian Church. That, I may say, was 
prevailingly my own position. I was not liturgical in those days, 
though not opposed to forms of prayer. But there was in the 
German Reformed Church somehow the power of a different 
spirit, that would not be kept down, but still cried, "Give us a 
Liturgy, whereby we may be able to worship God, like our fa- 
thers, with one mouth, as well as with one heart." Thus the 
Classis of East Pennsylvania urged the subject upon the atten- 
tion of the Synod, which met at Lancaster in 1847; stating its 
dissatisfaction with the Mayer Liturgy, and asking that either 
the Old Palatinate Liturgy, or some other, should be adopted, 
and made of general use in its place. The whole subject was 
hereupon referred to the several Classes for their consideration. 
They reported favorably to the object the following year; and 
the Synod of Hagerstown accordingly (1848), after a long and 
earnest discussion, placed the matter in the hands of a special 
Committee (Dr. J. H. A. Bomberger, Chairman), with instruc- 
tions to report at the next annual meeting of Synod. This re- 
port was presented to the Synod of Norristown in 1849, vindi- 
cating at large the use of liturgical forms, and recommending 
the appointment of a Committee to present at the next meeting 
of Synod a plan or schedule for a Liturgy, such as the wishes 
of the Church were supposed to require. The report was 



10 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



adopted; and & Liturgical Committee, as it came to be called 
afterwards, was constituted, for the purpose of carrying its re- 
commendation into effect. 

The Committee consisted of the following persons : Ministers, 
J. W. Nevin, Philip Schaff, Elias Heiner, B. C. Wolff, J. H. A. 
Bomberger, H. Harbaugh, J. F. Berg; Eiders, William Heyser, 
J. C. Bucher, Dr. C. Schaeffer, and G. C. Welker. 

Here properly starts, at the Synod of Norristown in 1849, 
the particular Liturgical Movement, which, running through a 
series of seventeen years, has issued finally in the Revised Lit- 
urgy as it now stands, and the history of which Dr. Bomberger 
has contrived so strangely to fabricate into a wholesale slander, 
of the vilest sort, against the Committee by whom it has been 
produced. 

Let no one imagine, however, that I propose to follow him in 
the details of his pretended historical argument, with the view 
of showing them untenable and false. That would be, indeed, 
both time and labor thrown away. He abounds in special plead- 
ing, and wastes page after page on points, that are, when all is 
done, of no account for the main issue in hand. He lays him- 
self out largely to show that the Synod from time to time clearly 
and plainly had one object in view, while the Committee was 
just as clearly and plainly bent on carrying out another object; 
and it is wonderful what an amount of petty, quibbling inter- 
pretation he employs to make the case appear in this false light. 
There is a great parade of trying to bring out in this small way 
the sense of particular documents and facts, as though this must 
necessarily show historical veracity and candor. But who does 
not know, how easy it is to make this sort of exactness in par- 
ticulars the medium of wholesale misrepresentation in regard to 
what is general ? This is just what Dr. Bomberger has done ; and 
what is required, therefore, is not a rectification of his histori- 
cal positions and points in detail, but a broad exposition rather 
of the universal falsehood that runs through his tract. This 
can be done, happily, without much trouble. 

A simple statement of the theory, on which the Doctor con- 
structs what he calls his History of the Ritualistic Movement 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



11 



in the German Reformed Church, is enough to overthrow, for 
any reflecting mind, the credit of the whole thing. It is too 
monstrously absurd for any sober belief. It bears the stamp of 
wholesale falsification on its very face. 

The theory runs as follows: — The Synod of the German Re- 
formed Church proposed to have a new Liturgy, and appointed a 
Committee of supposed reliable men (Dr. BombergerandDr. Berg 
among them), to bring out the work. The Synod had, at the same 
time, a very clear conception of what it wanted and wished in this 
movement, and took pains, from year to year, to make the Com- 
mittee understand exactly the character of the service they were 
expected to perform. Strangely enough, however, this Com- 
mittee seemed to be possessed, from the beginning, with a deter- 
mination not to do the very thing they were charged to do in this 
solemn way. Nay, worse than this; it soon became only too 
evident, that the Committee had deliberately made up their 
mind (Drs. Berg and Bomberger still among them), to do the 
very opposite of the thing they were thus charged to do; that 
they had, in other words, conceived the plan of another order 
of worship, a liturgical service altogether different from what 
the Synod was thinking and resolving about, and now set them- 
selves systematically to the task of bringing the Synod to ac- 
cept their scheme, instead of its own. It was a bold purpose, 
assuredly ; but the men also were bold, who had it in hand ; their 
position in the Church gave them mighty advantage; and the 
event has shown that their policy was at once far reaching and 
profound. They knew it was in vain to think of carrying their 
point with the Synod openly and directly. So they went to 
work stealthily, and with circuitous management and stratagem, 
to accomplish their object; content to wait through years, if 
only they might be sure of reaching it in the end. With this 
view, it became necessary, first of all, to stave off action in regard 
to the Liturgy ; in order that time might be gained in this way 
for working the mind of the Church round, by skilful manipu- 
lation, to a new way of looking at the subject, and so room be 
made for palming off upon it at last what the Committee wished 
to give it, in place of what the Church itself wanted to have. 



12 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



Such was the situation of things froni the very beginning of this 
Liturgical Movement; and here it is we have the key, which, 
properly applied, is sufficient to unlock the secret sense of all 
its historical intricacies, as regards both the Committee and the 
Synod. The history of the movement is simply the progress of 
a curious game between these two bodies — all simplicity on the 
one side, and all duplicity (diabolically astute) on the other — in 
which the Committee succeeds in out-witting and out-generalling 
the Synod through seventeen weary, mortal years; so as to 
bring things to the melancholy pass they have now reached in 
the Revised Liturgy. Whether the Committee acted, or refused 
to act, it all meant the same thing. Their one grand object 
throughout, was to baffle and defeat the wishes of the Synod; 
and this they did with a vengeance. Never, surely, was Govern- 
ment, political or religious, so impudently bamboozled before. 
The Synod had the power all in its own hands; might have had 
things at any time its own way; could have said whenever it 
pleased: "Gentlemen of the Liturgical Committee, you have 
been appointed to do the work we want, in the way we want, 
and not in any other way; and if you do not choose to do it in 
this way, go about your business ; we will appoint another Com- 
mittee to do the work in your place." This the Synod could 
have said and done at any time; but just this the Synod never 
did say, and never would do. On the contrary, it persisted all 
along in holding this same refractory Committee to its task. 
Year after year, the Committee reported, according to Dr. Bom- 
berger, that it was not doing what the Synod wanted; year after 
year, the Synod accepted the report, and continued the Com- 
mittee in service — all the while reiterating, according to Dr. 
Bomberger, in spirit, at least, if not in form, its original in- 
structions. No other Committee could serve its turn but this. 
No other, it was supposed, could produce a Liturgy to its satis- 
faction. In spite of all its miserable contumacy, tergiversation, 
and treasonable malpractice, no other was to be thought of for 
a moment as worthy of the same confidence. It must be either 
this Liturgical Committee or none. 0 marvellous Committee! 
No wonder there should.be to Dr. Bomberger's vision "a ser- 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



13 



pent" in the Liturgy itself, when the magicians that produced 
it could exercise such basilisk enchantment over the senses of 
the venerable body they thus played fast and loose with, through 
a period of seventeen years. 

The mere statement of such a theory as this, I repeat, is 
enough to cover it with confusion. It is outrageously prepos- 
terous. No man in his senses can believe it. Yet this is just 
what all comes to, in Dr. Bomberger's professed history of what 
he calls the ritualistic movement in the German Reformed 
Church. There is no true history in it. With all its talk about 
fairness and candor, documents and facts, it is nothing more 
than a caricature of history from beginning to end. 

The movement inaugurated at Norristown in 1849, he says, 
contemplated no such Liturgy as we have now offered for our 
use. This is very true, and needs no argument whatever. The 
Committee was instructed to "examine the various Liturgies of 
the Reformed Churches, and other works published on this sub- 
ject in later times, and specify, as far as this may be done, the 
particular forms that are believed to be needed, and furnish 
specimens also, such as may be regarded as called for in the 
circumstances of the Church in this country." All this, evi- 
dently, looks only to the conception of a book of forms for the 
pulpit; and falls far short of what the idea of a liturgical ser- 
vice has come to mean among us since that time. It is worthy 
of being noted, however, that even at this early stage of the 
movement, it was held that there should be no mere following 
of European examples in what was done, but a proper regard, 
also, to the circumstances of the Church in this country. 

At the Synod of Martinsburg, the following year, 1850, the 
Liturgical Committee was heard from, as follows: "The Com- 
mittee appointed to commence the preparation of a new Liturgy, 
respectfully report, that after such attention as they have been 
able to give to the subject, and in view of the general posture 
of the Church at the present time, they have not considered it 
expedient, as yet, to go forward with the work. Should it be 
felt necessary on the part of the Synod to bring out at 
once a new formulary for public use, it is believed that the 



14 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



most advisable course for the present would be to give a trans- 
lation simply of the old Liturgy of the Palatinate ; although 
the Committee are, by no means, of the mind, that this would 
be the best ultimate form in which to provide for the great in- 
terest here in question. Altogether, it is felt, however, that 
other questions now before the Church need first to be settled, 
in order that it may become important really to bestow any full 
and final care on this question of a new Liturgy." 

All this, certainly, looks innocent enough. The Committee 
felt that nothing they could make, in the way of compilation, 
out of the Palatinate Liturgy and others, would prove satisfac- 
tory ; and they gave this as a reason for their not having gone 
forward with the work assigned them; while they say, at the 
same time, that if Synod thought otherwise, and must have a 
formulary of the sort proposed without farther delay, then the 
Committee recommend simply the Old Palatinate Liturgy itself 
as the best present provision for the case. 

But see, now, how Dr. Bomberger manages to look at so 
plain and simple a matter through his green, historical specta- 
cles. Here, at the very outset, he tells us, we are met with 
that diplomatic duplicity, which is found to characterize the 
relations of the Committee to the Synod all along afterwards. 
He has the impudence to say, without a particle of proof, that 
" the real import of the reasons" assigned by the Committee, 
"for not at once proceeding with their work," was not what 
these seemed to mean at the time on their face. There was no 
honesty in their report. " The Synod had not asked the Com- 
mittee to investigate anew the subject of ecclesiastical ritualism; 
to take into consideration the expediency or the advisableness 
of going forward with the preparation of suitable forms; to 
inquire into the present posture of the Church ; or to raise other 
similar side issues." What they did now, in doing nothing, 
was the beginning of their refractoriness, and ominous of trou- 
ble. "This was the first instance in the history of this liturgi- 
cal movement, in which the Committee, through the influence 
of its leading members, set up its own opinions and wishes, in 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



15 



opposition to those of the Synod and the Church; unhappily, it 
was not the last." 

Is not this the sublimity of nonsense? Did not the Com- 
mittee recommend the Palatinate Liturgy, if one must be had 
at once, as the best thing they felt themselves prepared to bring 
forward at that time? What was there, then, to hinder the 
Synod from adopting it, and urging the use of it upon the 
churches? The Committee stated frankly their own opinion, 
that this would not prove ultimately satisfactory; but the Synod 
was not bound, in any way, to have the same judgment. Why 
did it not go on, then, to have the Palatinate Liturgy trans- 
lated and published? Plainly, because it thought, with the 
Committee, that the circumstances of the Church called for 
something different. No censure was passed on the Commit- 
tee. They were continued in office and trust, as before. 

One year after this, at the Synod of Lancaster, 1851, the 
Liturgical Committee again present themselves, and report no 
progress. They had not found the way open to do anything 
they could be satisfied with, in the work placed in their hands ; 
and they had come to despair very much of their being able to 
produce any Liturgy, that would prove generally and perma- 
nently satisfactory to the Church. This was especially my own 
feeling, I had not led the way at all in the movement; my 
heart was not in it with any special zeal; I was concerned with 
it only in obedience to the appointment of Synod; other in- 
terests appeared to me at the time to be of more serious ac- 
count; and I had no faith in our being able to bring the work 
to any ultimate success. In these circumstances, I was not 
willing to stand charged with the responsibility of continuing 
Chairman of the Committee; and I asked the Synod, accor- 
dingly, to relieve me from this position; with the understand- 
ing that I would be willing to act with it still in a subordinate 
character. The request was granted, and Dr. Schaff was made 
Chairman in my place. The name of Prof. T. C. Porter, at 
the same time, was added to the Committee. 

All this again looks innocent enough ; for common eyes, there 
would seem to be no mystery about it whatever. But only see 



16 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



once more, what becomes of it, when subjected to the disordered 
vision of Dr. Bomberger. I get no credit for giving up the leader- 
ship of the Committee; on the contrary, it seems to be regarded 
rather as a stroke of policy, which was designed to help on the 
general object of obstructing the work the Synod was vainly 
struggling to get done; although happily, in this case, it seems 
again, the Synod saw through the ruse, and waved it handsomely 
to the one side. "It was probably understood," we are told, "by 
most of the clergymen at least of the Synod, why Dr. Nevin 
had been unable to carry out the wishes of the Church in the 
work of the Liturgy, and why he desired to be relieved from all 
responsibility as Chairman of the Committee. But the Synod 
showed no disposition to modify its views, in order to accommo- 
date them to his opinions in the case. Had there been any 
thought of departing from the purpose and principles at first 
laid down by tlTe Synod of Norristown, this would have been a 
fitting time to bring out such a thought. Instead, however, of 
betraying any tendency in this direction, the Synod held fast 
to its original design, accepted- Dr. -Nevin's resignation, ap- 
pointed Dr. Schaff in his place, and impliedly, said: Now, 
brethren, we hope you will have no farther difficulty in pressing 
forward rapidly with the work, according to instructions previ- 
ously given, but be able to report its early completion." How 
the plot thickens ! How the history becomes clear as mud! 

The hypothesis is, that the Committee have joined hands to 
thwart the Synod in its design to have a certain kind of Liturgy. 
Dr. Schaff and myself are at the bottom of the conspiracy; we 
have conceived the idea of reaching, at last, another order of 
worship altogether, and are doing all we can, theologically, to 
bring about such a result; we have engaged the Committee to 
hold back the liturgical movement ; and my giving up the helm 
is only part of the play, intended to bring matters to a dead- 
lock, and thus force the Synod to come into our views. The 
Synod has some dim sense, however, of the way things are 
going ; winks significantly at the last sly trick in particular ; 
places the rudder in the trustworthy hands of Dr. Schaff; leaves 
the impracticable Committee constituted, in all other respects, 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



17 



as before ; and bids a hearty God-speed to their labors, with in- 
struction to "report as soon as possible." Is not that rich? 

Dr. Schaff now went to work in earnest, and set the rest of 
us to work also, in preparing forms. He had faith in the 
movement ; as for myself, I had, I confess, almost none. Still, 
I tried to do my share of service, and spent hours in what was 
found to be generally a tedious and irksome task. The work 
involved, necessarily, liturgical studies; and these brought 
with them a growing liturgical culture, which required an en- 
largement of the range, within which it was proposed, origi- 
nally, to confine the course of the movement. 

In the report of the Committee, made to the Synod of Balti- 
more in 1852, through Dr. Schaff, all this is brought fairly and 
fully into view. It gave a plan of such a Liturgy as was pro- 
posed ; set forth the principles on which it should be constructed, 
and offered some specimens of what it was expected to contain. 
In this report, the ground is taken distinctly, that the new 
Liturgy ought not to be shaped simply after modern models, 
reaching back no farther than the Reformation ; that among 
these later schemes of worship, " special reference ought to be 
had to the Old Palatinate and other Reformed Liturgies of the 
sixteenth century"; but that the general basis of the work 
should be " the liturgical worship of the Primitive Church, as 
far as this can be ascertained from the Holy Scriptures, the 
oldest ecclesiastical writers, and the Liturgies of the Greek and 
Latin Churches of the third' and fourth centuries." Should 
the principles proposed be conscientiously and wisely carried 
out, the report, in conclusion, adds, "it is hoped that, by the 
blessing of God, a Liturgy might be produced at last, which 
will be a bond of union, both with the ancient Catholic Church 
and the Reformation, and yet be the product of the religious 
life of our denomination in its present state." 

Dr. Bomberger troubles himself sorely with this famous Bal- 
timore report. The Synod, he thinks, hardly knew what it 
was about, when it was induced to adopt it. " There was no 
time taken," he tells us, "to weigh its import. There was no 
dissection of its several parts, no discussion of its pregnant pro- 
2 



18 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



positions. With all the saving, modifying clauses, which we 
shall show it contains, it cannot be denied, that it proposes great 
departures from the original design and purpose of the Synod." 
This is a great confession, coming from Dr. Bomberger. But 
he tries bravely again to do away with its damaging effect ; by 
catching at all the "saving, modifying clauses " he can find in 
the case, and making use of them in the way of very small chi- 
canery and special pleading, to show that after all the action of 
Synod here, does not mean as much as it seems to mean. Mat- 
ters might have been worse. There is room for praise in what 
was done, as well as blame. The wisdom of the Synod shines 
beautifully through its folly; its unseemly haste is charac- 
terized, after all, by great caution. " It is very significant," 
our ecclesiastical Philadelphia lawyer tells us, "that its action 
is expressed in such cautious terms." " Hastily as this im- 
portant report was disposed of, there is no such endorsement of 
its peculiar sentiments, no such committal even to the general 
basis and plan of liturgy now proposed, or to the proposed de- 
partures from the first purpose and aim of Synod in this whole 
movement, as should be considered sufficient to bind the Synod 
and the Church to all the details of the report, or to debar 
all modifications and objections which subsequent reflection 
might suggest." Precious crumbs of comfort for the chickens 
of the covenant, truly, in so hard a case! "It proves the 
wisdom of the body," it is added, a that it spoke with so 
much official reserve upon the subject. The report was 
simply adopted, without any expression on its merits." Only 
this, and nothing more; saving merely a resolution, bidding the 
Committee to go ahead with their work, and "to carry out the 
suggestions made at the close of their report." Only this; 
" even suppose the pound of flesh is rigorously exacted, and the 
Synod held relentlessly to the letter of the bond." Only this, 0 
Shylock ; and nothing more. 

A truce, however, to this pleasantry. I have no mind to 
stand strictly upon the pound of flesh; and do not care at all 
to run a race of special pleading with Dr. Bomberger for the 
exact letter of this Baltimore bond. It may not mean, in the 
circumstances, all that it has been logically made to mean since. 



OF TIIE NEW LITURGY. 



19 



It is very likely, the Synod did not closely weigh terms, and 
that, for a large part of it at least, the full import of its action 
was not, at the time, distinctly considered. But what then ? 
Are we to suppose, that it had not at least a general sense of 
what it was about ? This general sense, in the case, is all we 
care for; and it is, in fact, also all that is needed, to take the 
wind out of Dr* Bomberger's historical hobby, and to place the 
liturgical movement before us in its true light. 

Movement there was in the matter, beyond all controversy or 
question. The Committee had moved ; they make no secret of 
the fact; they come before the Synod, asking an enlargement 
of the terms of their commission. And now it appears that 
there has been movement also in the Synod. The confession 
the Committee make of their troubles is taken in good part. 
It ought not to have been so, according to Dr. Bombergen 
"Who had directed them," he asks, "to make the study of 
medieval or still earlier liturgies and litanies an essential part 
of their work ? Who had requested them to make selections of 
services from works issued before the Reformation? Not the 
Synod. On the contrary, not trusting to what might be taken 
for granted, the Synod, as we have seen, from the first, used 
the precaution of naming, definitely, the sources from which it 
expected the matter of the new Liturgy to be substantially 
drawn. These were genuine Reformed Liturgies from that of 
the Palatinate (1663) onwards." What business had the Com- 
mittee, then, to be bewildering and befogging themselves, like 
wayward, truant children, with studies outside of these whole- 
some limits. "Above all, what propriety was there in seeking 
to involve the Synod and the Church in perplexities, by which, 
through their disregard of very definite instructions, they had 
become embarrassed ? Neglecting to use the chart and com- 
pass put into their hands by the Church, they had become en- 
tangled in the wilderness. Why seek to entice the Church into 
that same wilderness, not to help them out, but to lodge or 
wander there with them?" The case is well put. All can see 
that. But, unfortunately, this Baltimore Synod would not 
look at the matter in that way. It did not get angry with the 



20 HISTORICAL VINDICATION 

Committee; did not scold it; did not bid it back, like a set of 
naughty children, to the bounds from which it had wilfully 
strayed. On the contrary, the Synod professed to be well 
pleased with the Committee ; approved its wandering studies ; 
had compassion on its perplexities ; and generously granted all 
it asked in the way of enlarged powers. The Church, in other 
words, followed the Committee into the wilderness. Was there 
no movement in all this? Did the Synod of Baltimore stand, 
in regard to the liturgical question, just where the Synod of 
Norristown stood three years before ? Could it possibly dream 
that it did so, in the surroundings of its action ? No amount 
of pettifoggery can set aside, what all the world may so easily 
see to be the plain meaning of so plain a case. 

The matter, however, admits and requires a still broader 
view than this. Whatever the Baltimore Synod meant by its 
action, that action was not final. It could not bind the Church, 
says Dr. Bomberger, against the reaction of better subsequent 
thought rearward. Just as little, say we, could it bind the 
Church against the movement of better subsequent thought for- 
ward. Our concern, in the case of these Baltimore principles 
and instructions, is, after all, not so much with what they 
meant for the Baltimore Synod itself, as with the sense in 
which they have been actually carried out since by the Liturgi- 
cal Committee, under the eye and open sanction of more than 
a dozen later Synods. With regard to this, at all events, there 
can be no mistake. The liturgical movement, the true inward 
history of the new Liturgy, did not begin in 1852 ; and it was 
very far from having come to its end there. 

The names of the Rev. Dr. D. Zacharias, and Elders G. 
Schseffer and J. Rodenmayer, were now substituted, in the 
Committee, for those of the Rev. Dr. Berg (who had gone into 
the Reformed Dutch Church), and the Elders, J. C. Bucher 
and Dr. C. Schseifer (deceased). There was added to it, also, 
the name of the Rev. Dr. Samuel R. Fisher. 

Three years now passed, before we hear of another report 
from the Liturgical Committee. It was working to some ex- 
tent ; but not with any comfortable feeling of success. During- 



OP THE NEW LITURGY. 



21 



part of the time, Dr. SchafF was in Europe. Much that was 
done was felt to be afterwards unsatisfactory. There was an 
accumulation of material, which brought with it no light or 
order in the work of construction. The more the Committee 
read and studied, and talked together, on the subject, the 
more they found that it was no small thing to make a Liturgy ; 
and could only smile at the easy credulity with which it had 
been imagined at the first, that such a work might be carried 
through in the course of a single year. One great difficulty 
was, that the work seemed continually to unsettle and destroy 
itself. What was done, would not stay done; but had all the 
time to be done over again. In knowing the wreck of matter, 
and the crush of forms, through which the hard way of the 
Committee thus led them, one is tempted to think Dr. Bomber- 
ger half right; and to ask what business they had then to be 
troubling themselves with out of the way studies, which nobody 
required at their hands. Why should they have left the green 
pastures of ignorance, and the quiet waters of tradition, where 
they were first put to the working out of their task? Why, 
indeed, 0 foolish, straying, and now much-bewildered Liturgi- 
cal Committee. 

At the Synod of Chambersburg, however, in 1855, we meet 
them again ; and are pleased to learn, from their report, that 
they have made progress, and are in a fair way to get their 
work before the Church in the course of the coming year. But 
the tone in which they speak of it is anything but sanguine. 
" A growing sense," they say, "of the great difficulty and re- 
sponsibility of the task intrusted to their care, and of their in- 
sufficiency satisfactorily to perform it, has brought them to the 
conclusion strongly to dis-advise any final action of Synod, for 
some time to come, on this subject; which is so intimately in- 
terwoven with the most vital and sacred interests of the Church, 
and which is just now beginning to be seriously agitated also 
in various other Protestant denominations of our country. 
Their intention is simply to furnish, according to the best of 
their ability, a provisional liturgy, including a sufficient variety 
of forms for examination and optional use, until the Church be 



22 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



fully prepared, by practical experience, to bring it into such a 
shape and form as will best suit the wants of our ministers and 
congregations, and make it, under the blessing of God, a rich 
fountain of sound piety and fervent devotion for many genera- 
tions." 

The Synod, as usual, made the action of the Committee its 
own. The report was adopted ; the proposition in regard to a 
provisional liturgy was approved ; and order was taken to pro- 
vide for its publication. At the same time, the Rev. Dr. E. V. 
Gerhart was added to the Committee. 

The Committee went on working; but found it impossible 
still to bring their work to a close so soon as they had expected. 
Meeting after meeting was called; and session after session 
was devoted to the task of reviewing preparations, discussing 
principles, weighing thoughts, and measuring the proper sense 
of words. A most important educational discipline, all felt it 
to be who took part in it, not only in a liturgical but also in a 
theological view. But the discipline was laborious and dis- 
couraging. As before, it was hard to get things finally fixed. 
Reconstruction and reorganization seemed to have no end. At 
last, however, though not until another meeting of Synod had 
passed, the end did come; and the Committee met, for the last 
time as they trusted, in October, 1857, to subject their work to 
a final joint revision, and to superintend its rapid progress 
through the press. 

This was an interesting occasion. The entire work, previ- 
ously examined and agreed upon in parts, was now, after a 
new general review, adopted unanimously as a whole, in the 
form in which it became known afterwards as the Provisional 
Liturgy. It is a little curious, that the only notice we have of 
this meeting, and of the merits of the new Liturgy, published 
at the time, is from the pen of the same Dr. J. H. A. Bomber- 
ger, who sees in the whole Liturgical Movement now nothing 
less than a foul conspiracy against the dearest interests of the 
German Reformed Church. It is to be found in a long article 
which he published in the German Reformed Messenger of 
November 18, 1857 ? devoted wholly to the purpose of recom- 



OP THE NEW LITURGY. 



23 



mending the work. It can do no harm, to borrow here a few 
touches from this fine old historiographical sketch. They be- 
long properly to our subject. 

The Committee, it should have been stated, met in Philadel- 
phia. The occasion was metropolitan. "Its final sessions," we 
are informed, "were held in the old consistory room of the Race 
street German Reformed Church, and around the same old walnut 
table, at which Schlatter, Wynckhaus, Hendel, HehTenstein, and 
"VVeiberg, all of blessed memory, had so often been seated, when 
presiding over the council of the congregation, or instructing 
the youth of their charge in the holy doctrines of our religion, 
as set forth in the Heidelberg Catechism. The sessions of the 
Committee were closed with a fervent thanksgiving prayer, and 
the singing of the doxology." 

Now for the character of the work. " The Plan and Prin- 
ciples reported to the Synod of Baltimore in 1852, and then 
approved of" — it is thus the Dr. Bomberger of 1857 can talk — 
"have been faithfully adhered to in the execution of the work. 
Accordingly, while everything has been made to yield to the 
true standard and spirit of genuine Evangelical Protestantism, 
and especially to the Reformed type thereof, scope has been 
given to that liberal, catholic spirit, which constitutes one of 
the most glorious characteristics of an elevated Christian free- 
dom, and is the beautiful contrast of every sort of bigotry and 
exclusiveness. 'All things are yours,' is the assurance of the 
Apostle. The Evangelical Catholic Christian, therefore, may 
appreciate every thing that is good, and make it auxiliary to 
his faith, his piety, and his love. He need despise, or reject, 
no age, no nation, no Church, no body of Christians who hold 
the truth in righteousness, but regard all with charity, and 
learn from all, with meek wisdom, whatever they may offer for 
his improvement. In this spirit, according to the Plan and 
Principles referred to, the Committee, like the prudent scribe 
(Matt, xiii : 52), seems to have endeavored to bring forth, out 
of the rich treasures of the Church, things old and new, that 
by all combined, the edification of Christ's flock may be se- 
cured. But the Christian liberality of spirit thus exercised 



24 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



has been, we believe, limited at all points by ultimate reference 
to our old standard Palatinate Liturgy. So that while such 
modifications (in the general plan, in the specific forms, and in 
the pervading style), as were felt to be expedient and neces- 
sary, have been freely allowed, the new work will be found to 
be in essential agreement with the old. It may be said to be 
what the original framers of the Palatinate Liturgy would have 
made it, had they lived and labored in such a period as ours." — 
•'The book, like every thing else new, will have to be tried, be- 
fore any right judgment can be passed upon it. If only it be 
tried in candor!" — "If only the sacramental, festival, and special 
forms of the new work should come into general public use in 
our Church, a greatly beneficial influence must be exerted. We 
have seen and read these forms, and feel confident that they 
will commend themselves to the warmest approval of all who 
will seriously and candidly study them." — "Although the forms 
for the administration of the sacraments are intended to be 
used chiefly by pastors and people collectively on the appro- 
priate occasions, they will be found no less instructive for pri- 
vate perusal. Parents, who have been blessed with children, 
whom they have given to the Lord in baptism, would find much 
admonition and profit in the baptismal service. The reading 
of it at intervals, in their homes, and to their children, would 
keep all concerned in beneficial remembrance of what had been 
promised and done. And nothing, in the way of outward help, 
would be so well calculated (in the writer's full conviction) to 
promote the worthy and comfortable observance of the Holy 
Supper, as the devout perusal of the communion service on the 
evening, or several times during the week, before the sacra- 
mental Sunday." 

Who would imagine this to be the very same Dr. J. H. A. 
Bomberger, that now breathes out threatenings and slaughter 
against the Liturgy in its revised form ; who sees in it all manner 
of "Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire;" and who espe- 
cially denounces its baptismal and communion services (in no 
material point changed from what they were in 1857), as being 
surcharged with theological poison of the very worst kind! 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



25 



At the Synod of Allentown in 1857, the Committee reported 
what was now done. The Provisional Liturgy was complete, 
and in the printer's hands. The report was adopted ; and the 
following vote of thanks was passed at the same time, showing 
the light in which the services of the Committee were regarded. 
It does not sound much like alienation of confidence, or soured 
humor. The whole runs: "Resolved, That our most devout 
thanks are due to the Great Head of the Church, for having 
sustained the brethren of the Committee in their weighty labors, 
and for having gifted them with that spirit of cordial harmony 
essential to the success of such an undertaking. Resolved, 
That the thanks of this Synod are due, and are hereby tendered, 
to the brethren of the Committee, for the strict attention, the 
untiring perseverance, the self-denying labors, and the unwa- 
vering fidelity, which they have devoted to the work assigned 
to them, and that this Synod heartily commend them to the 
blessing of Almighty God, and to the warmest regard and love 
of the German Reformed Church." And yet, according to Dr. 
Bomberger, this same Committee (himself among them) had been 
fooling the Synod for eight long years; not doing all the time 
what the Synod wanted done; and now at last stood there in- 
sulting the Synod to its very face, with the offer of a Liturgy, 
the like of which nobody had dreamed of in 1849 a't Norris- 
town! 

The Provisional Liturgy, of course, carried with it no binding 
authority of any kind for the churches. They were merely al- 
lowed to make use of it, in whole or in part, if they saw proper. 
It was put forth professedly as an experiment. By an under- 
standing with the publishers, this arrangement was to run on 
for at least ten years. 

I had no expectation myself, that the work would be generally 
adopted. It was not fitted for easy and smooth practice; it 
seemed to be too great a change for our churches ; the very fact 
of its being an experiment, stood in the way of any general se- 
rious effort to bring it into use. Still I did not feel that the 
labors of the Committee had been thrown away. The work had 
its literary value. It might do good service educationally. It 



26 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



was a relief to feel, at all events, that with it we had reached a 
decent end for our long, weary pilgrimage in search of a Litur- 
gy ; for there was no reason to think we could now reach our 
object in any other way. The Church might not be prepared 
at all for this new order of worship; but it was just as clear, 
that she could not now be satisfied with any such book of forms 
as was thought of in the beginning. We were beyond that. We 
had got into the wilderness together; and the best we could do 
was to make up our minds now to stay there for forty years at 
least, leaving it for the next generation to get up their own 
Liturgy, should they think proper, in a way to please them- 
selves. That was about the feeling in which I had come to settle 
down comfortably in regard to the whole matter; and it gave 
me any thing but pleasure to be rudely jostled out of it, a few 
years later, by the cry that was raised for a Revision. 

The Liturgy, in fact, did not get into any general use. In 
that respect it proved a failure. Yet it was wonderful to see, 
how it worked notwithstanding as a silent influence among us, 
in favor of sound ideas on the subject of Christian worship. It 
wrought a change, far and wide, in the spirit and form of our 
sanctuary services. It served to deepen among us the power of 
the liturgical movement, which had given it birth. It became 
more and more apparent, that this movement could not be turned 
back; could not be arrested, and made to stand still. Its-only 
redemption and deliverance lay in going forward. 

Three years later, at the Synod of Lebanon, in 1860, the 
Liturgical Committee made their final report, and were dis- 
charged. The subject of revision had now come to engage con- 
siderable attention; and this same Synod, accordingly, passed 
an act referring the work to the examination of the Classes, 
for the purpose of obtaining their judgment of what was desira- 
ble with regard to it in this view. 

Meanwhile, however, the old treasonable practising of the 
Committee against the Church was kept up, according to Dr. 
Bomberger, even worse than before. The Committee, as such, 
indeed, was discharged, and had no longer any existence; but 
its members were as badly alive and awake as ever ; and their 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



27 



■ plan was now to have the work of revision deferred (as they 
had held back the work of preparation before, with masterly in- 
activity, through so many years), in the hope that the Provi- 
sional Liturgy, every where unpopular, might still go on never- 
theless to infect the popular mind with its deleterious poison; 
so that the way should be open finally for revising it at last into 
the full-blown ritualism, which it had been in the heart of this 
conspiracy all along to compass and reach. And now let the 
world take note of "a remarkable phenomenon, having relation 
to the general movement, which appeared during the year 
1861" — a sort of prodigy in the heavens, that might well cause 
children at least to stand aghast. The Liturgy would not take 
with the grown membership of the Church; the people refused 
to be educated by it out of their old notions and customs. So 
the defunct Committee, it would seem, said somehow among 
themselves : " Go to now ; we will send forth a lying spirit among 
the children, whereby they can be reached and trained into the 
new ways. Children and youth are pliant and unsuspicious; 
they can be taught and moulded to any thing." A new Sun- 
day-school Hymn Book, for which, unfortunately, there was 
only too much need at the time, with proper ritualistic appara- 
tus, suggested itself as a proper medium for the end proposed; 
and a suitable organ to produce it was not long wanting. The 
plot, accordingly, was carried into effect. " Such a Hymn 
Book," we are solemnly informed, "was prepared by the Rev. 
Dr. Harbaugh, a member of the Liturgical Committee, and was 
sent forth on its Jesuitical mission." Was it not, then, by the 
instigation of the Committee ? If not, pray, by whose insti- 
gation? 

At the Synod of Easton, in 1861, the action of the several 
Classes on the question of revision, was reported at large. It 
did not amount to much. The Classes were greatly divided in 
their judgment; and so far as any suggestions were made in re- 
gard to what should be modified or changed, they were of too 
loose and indeterminate a character altogether to be of any prac- 
tical account. The whole subject, in truth, was exceedingly 
confused. Nobody doubted the necessity of having the Liturgy 



28 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



revised sooner or later, if it was ever to come into general use; 
the only question was, whether the revision should go on imme- 
diately, or be postponed, for years at least, if not indefinitely. 
For reasons already given, I was myself in favor of indefinite 
postponement. 

The proposition to take the work in hand at once, however, 
prevailed. After considerable discussion, the Synod took action 
as follows: " Resolved, That the Provisional Liturgy be placed 
in the hands of the original Committee for final revision ; and 
that the Committee be instructed to consider the suggestions of 
the Classes as given in the minutes of their late meetings, and 
use them in the revision of their work, as far as the general va- 
riety of the work will allow, and in a way that shall not be in- 
consistent either with established liturgical principles and usages, 
or with the devotional or doctrinal genius of the German Re- 
formed Church. That the Committee be requested to report at 
the next annual meeting of the Synod, if possible, with a view 
of bringing this devotional work to a consummation desired by 
the Church, during the Tricentennial commemoration of the 
Heidelberg Catechism." 

To any unsophisticated mind, the sense of this proceeding is 
abundantly plain. It did not mean, that the Committee must 
fall back on the old Norristown instructions of 1849 ; that the 
Synod had not changed at all its views of what a Liturgy should 
be since that time; and that the course of the Committee, in not 
carrying them out heretofore, had been refractory and contu- 
macious. Nothing of this sort. It meant plainly a reiteration 
of the Baltimore instructions of 1852; in the sense in which 
these had been distinctly understood and acted upon by the 
Committee afterwards ; in the sense in which every body could 
see that they had been actually wrought into the constitution of 
the Provisional Liturgy. That was, in fact, an attempt to bring 
the liturgical life of the first ages into harmonious union with 
the devotional and doctrinal genius of the Reformed Church in 
modern times. And now the order of Synod is, not that it 
should be pulled to pieces under pretence of amendment, but 
that its organic unity should be preserved; so that, through all 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



29 



changes, it should remain substantially what it now was, and 
not be metamorphosed into something else of wholly different 
nature. This, unquestionably, is what the action of that Easton 
Synod means, and was intended to mean. And in token of it 
still farther, we have the old Committee called into existence 
again, to carry out the work ; the very last agency, if Dr. Bom- 
berger's misrepresentations were correct, that should have been 
thought of for any such purpose. It would have been easy to 
appoint a new Committee. But no ; that would not do. Only 
the old Committee, it was supposed, could do proper justice to 
their own work. Let them have full power, therefore, to man- 
age this liturgical question, as before. The Synod will have no 
other Committee. 

Many will remember how earnestly I tried, at this time, to 
have my own name, at least, dropped from this new commission. 
I told the Synod, that I had no faith in the undertaking; that 
I did not think the Church was prepared to receive the Liturgy 
in any form we could give it; that I knew the proposed work 
would involve far more than the slight changes some talked of ; 
that I was sure the Committee would not be able to get forward 
now with full agreement; that there was no reason then to ex- 
pect that the Church generally would be satisfied with what was 
done; that in these circumstances the service appeared to me a 
thankless waste of labor and time; that I had no heart for it, 
and could not take part in it with any animation or zeal; and 
that my want of spirit in this- way would make me a dead weight 
only on the cause I was expected to serve. All this I urged; 
and fairly begged, over and over again, to be excused from the 
appointment. But the Synod would not hearken to my prayer. 
The old Committee must serve; and I must serve with it — in 
spite of all I had done, according to Dr. Bomberger, to upset 
the order and change the life of the German Reformed Church, 
by this very liturgical movement, in previous years. 

In the face of these broad facts, what becomes of the special 
pleading of such a man, put forward here again, as in the case 
of the Synod of Baltimore, to torture words and phrases into 



30 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



the service of his own fancies? Is it any thing better than fio 
much idle wind? 

When the Committee came together again, it turned out as I 
expected. There was a difference of opinion among them, in re* 
gard to the principles by which they were to be governed in 
their revision. Dr. Bomberger took one view of the subject, 
while the rest of the Committee in attendance took another. 
Three days, at least, were consumed in friendly discussion, and 
abortive attempts to get forward. Finally, it was felt necessary 
to refer the difficulty to Synod for settlement; whereupon the 
following action was unanimously adopted: 

" Whereas, In the endeavor to revise the Provisional Liturgy, 
the Committee discover, after a long discussion, protracted 
through several days, that there is a radical difference of opinion 
among its members concerning the import of the resolutions of 
Synod ; therefore, Resolved, That the Rev. Dr. J. W. Nevin pre- 
pare a report to Synod, setting forth a clear, definite, and full idea 
of both schemes of worship advocated in Committee, in order 
that Synod may understand the real question at issue, and state 
in explicit terms what it requires at our hands." 

This took place in Lancaster. A meeting of the Committee 
was held subsequently in Lebanon, when the report thus called 
for was received, adopted, and ordered to be published for the 
consideration of the Church. Dr. Bomberger voted against this 
action. The report was presented to the next Synod, which met 
at Chambersburg in 1862, in the form of a tract, bearing the 
title: " The Liturgical Question, with reference to the Pro- 
visional Liturgy of the German Reformed Church." 

Much ado has been made about this tract. The object of it, 
however, is sufficiently plain. The liturgical interest among us 
had become embarassed by its own movement. There were 
mixed up in it two different conceptions of what a liturgy ought 
to be. We had started in 1849 with one; all of us, Committee 
and Synod, having in our mind at that time, almost entirely, the 
notion simply of a book of forms for the pulpit. But we were 
carried gradually beyond this, and came to feel more and more 
the meaning of worship in its proper congregational view; which 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



31 



brought with it, of course, the idea of a liturgy directed and 
adapted more particularly to this end; the idea, in other words, 
of a liturgy belonging, not properly to the pulpit, but to the 
altar. Not that these two conceptions were consciously distin- 
guished in this way. On the contrary, they ran more or less 
into one another; only with a growing preponderance of favor 
toward the idea of altar worship — even where the meaning of it 
was not yet fully understood. Under the plastic force of this 
sentiment it was, that the Provisional Liturgy had finally taken 
form and shape. It was prevailingly an order of worship for 
the altar. It became this mainly through its communion ser- 
vice, which was made to rule and control the movement of all 
its other services. There were come few forms in it, indeed, 
and parts of forms, which were not strictly coherent with this 
scheme, but might be said to be of the character rather of mere 
pulpit services ; and so far it may be admitted that Dr. Bom- 
berger is right in ascribing what he calls a duplex character to the 
work. But he is egregiously wide of the mark, when he speaks 
of by far the greatest portion of it as being of the type now re- 
ferred to; to such extent, he says, as "greatly to overshadow, 
and almost exclude the other;" and nothing could well be more 
ridiculous, than his notion of converting the whole into a good 
and acceptable form book for the pulpit, by simply doing away 
with the responses, and striking out or changing a few passages 
here and there, supposed to be of objectionable sound. It is all 
the other way ; the reigning character of the Provisional Liturgy 
is that of an altar service, and what there is in it that does not 
fall in with this conception, is there only by exception, and in 
the way of compromise, as it were, with the opposite scheme. 
So at least the Committee felt, which had produced it, all ex- 
cept Dr. Bomberger; and so they understood the Synod to feel, 
in the direction it had given them to be governed in their revi- 
sion by a proper regard to "the general unity of the work." 
It was felt, at the same time, however, that there might be, and 
probably was, a measure of confusion still in the mind of the 
Church with regard to the subject; and when Dr. Bomberger 
now joined issue with the rest of us on this fundamental ques- 



32 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



tion at the very threshold of our new work, there seemed to be 
but one course for us honestly and honorably to pursue. We 
would refer the question to Synod; and we would try to do this 
in such a way, as to cut off, if possible, all room for mistake, 
and to bring out the mind of the Synod in such sort that there 
should be no room to dispute about it afterwards. This was 
the object of the tract now under consideration; and it was pur- 
posely written in the form which seemed best suited to reach 
that object. 

To Dr. Bomberger's jaundiced vision, this tract, like every- 
thing else done or left undone by the Committee, was part of 
our plan, either to cajole or dragoon the Church into the scheme 
of ritualism we were forging for its neck. But in that view, 
never surely did a band of conspirators play a more stupid 
game. For what course could the Committee have taken, that 
was more likely than just the publication of this tract, to rouse 
against them and their work all the anti-liturgical, or merely 
semi-liturgical spirit there was in the Church? Was it not a 
perfect godsend, in this respect, to Dr. Bomberger himself? 
Has it not been the armory, from which he has stolen his best 
thunder against the Liturgy ever since? Have not its "con- 
cessions" been held up, on all sides, to the people, as enough 
to damage and damn the work before all examination? Were 
we not gravely told at Dayton, by more than one respectable 
declaimer, that the Liturgical Committee had in this tract 
charged themselves with a design to revolutionize, radically, the 
ecclesiastical life of the German Reformed Church, and madly 
asked the Synod of Chambersburg, at the same time, to co- 
operate with them in carrying out their nefarious purpose? 
What truly magnificent cunning ! What marvellous profundity 
of art! 

Any honest person can see that the tract, instead of being an 
attempt to seduce the Synod into the views of the Committee, 
was, in fact, a most honest effort to place the whole subject in a 
light, which might preclude all blind judgment in regard to 
it, and bring the Synod to act upon it in the most free and in- 
dependent way. Speaking for myself again, I may say that I 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



33 



hardly expected or wished the Synod to fall in with the high 
view of altar worship presented in the tract. Had that body 
been prepared to say, "We want no such worship as that," I 
would have been content, and more than content, to be dis- 
charged from all further concern in the case. As it was, I was 
determined, at all events, that there should be no farther mis- 
understanding, if there had been any before, of what the Commit- 
tee had been doing thus far, and of what they intended to do 
still, if they were required to go on with this work. With this 
view, the case was put in the most extreme light. The dis- 
tinction between the two orders of worship (pulpit liturgy and 
altar liturgy) was drawn in clear lines; and in a way which 
has caused it to be understood since, and practically laid to 
heart, as it had not been before. The idea of an altar 
liturgy was declared to be alone worthy of respect. Then it 
was openly said, in substance: "This idea has governed the 
work of the Committee thus far, in conformity, as they have 
supposed, with the instructions of the Synod of Baltimore, in 
1852; the Provisional Liturgy is an altar liturgy, in the sense 
of this tract ; and it cannot be made to be any thing else, with- 
out destruction of its organic unity and wholeness. That, at 
least, is the judgment of the Liturgical Committee. It is for 
the Synod, then, to know and to say, what its real wishes are 
in this posture of the case. Shall the liturgical movement go 
on still in the line of this Provisional Liturgy, as thus deter- 
mined by the sense of the Committee that framed it; or shall 
it be now stopped here, and turned into another and wholly 
different course?" 

Dr. Bomberger, in the meantime, had been at work, in his 
own way, to out-plot the Committee. He had taken it into his 
head, that he could, himself, do up in short order what the 
Church wanted in this business of revision ; and came, accord- 
ingly, prepared with a scheme of alterations and amendments, 
which he fondly hoped the Synod might be ready at once to 
adopt, and so end the whole matter. Of all this, he said not a 
word to the Committee, when he met with them previously in 
regular session, at Chambersburg ; but sprung the whole sud- 



34 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



denly upon Synod itself, in most unparliamentary style, by 
means of what he was pleased to call a minority report, in op- 
position to the report of the Committee. His proposed revision, 
however, found no favor ! It only served to show how absurd 
it was to think of manufacturing the Provisional Liturgy into 
different shape in that mechanical way. There were not proba- 
bly three members of the Synod who would have been willing 
to vote for the piebald affair. No vote, however, was taken 
upon it. There was an animated debate on the general subject 
of the Liturgy, continuing through three days ; at the end of 
which it was decided, with overwhelming voice, that the way 
was not open for taking any further action in regard to the 
Provisional Liturgy at that time; that the optional use of it, 
as previously allowed, should be continued till the end of ten 
years from the time of its first publication; and that the whole 
question of its revision should be indefinitely postponed. The 
Liturgical Committee was thus dissolved a second time. 

This took place in 1862. In the fall of 1863, the General 
Synod of the Reformed Church held its first meeting in Pitts- 
burg. Here the subject was again called up, in connection 
with a request in regard to it from the Western Synod. Liberty 
was granted to this Synod to go on and prepare a new Liturgy, 
such as, in their view, might suit the wants of the Church; 
while it was recommended, at the same time, that the Eastern 
Synod also should go forward with the revision of its Liturgy 
according to its own judgment, so that it might come before 
the General Synod in complete form, with a view to final action 
upon the whole subject. 

In conformity with this recommendation, the Eastern Synod, 
which met at Lancaster the following year, 1864, resolved that 
a Committee should be appointed to revise the Provisional 
Liturgy, so as to have it in readiness for being presented in the 
way required, to the next General Synod. 

But only see now what a mess is made of all this by Dr. 
Bomberger, in his morbid desire to criminate the Liturgical 
Committee. Their relation to the Synod throughout, in his 
view, was one of disobedience and perverse unfaithfulness. 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



35 



The work which Synod had expressly put upon them, three 
years before, they had failed to perform. Nay, they had even 
succeeded at Chambersburg, in 1862, in getting it indefinitely 
postponed; thus "gaining their point," we are told, which was 
time, in the interest of their " extreme ritualistic views." How 
the Synod could stand such treatment, was wonderful; yet 
stand it the Synod did, even to the extent of itself doing, un- 
asked, in this last case, all the Committee secretly wished; 
wearied and worried out of all patience, it would seem, by the 
contradiction it was called to endure, and ready, at last, to do 
any thing, just for the privilege of being allowed to adjourn. 
Now, however, in 1864, one is pleased to find a much-abused 
Church freeing herself at long last from the badgering and brow- 
beating to which she has been subjected, by her public servants, 
for so many years. In all conscience, the tragi-comic drama 
has been carried far enough; let it, then, come to an end. 
"It was evident," says Dr. Bomberger, speaking of the crisis 
to which things had come, "that no farther delay would be 
tolerated. Patient as the Church had always shown itself, 
even almost to weakness, toward the private views and de- 
sires of some of her leading men, and tolerant of what often 
wore the semblance of disobedience and dictation — tolerant as 
scarcely any other Church had ever been in similar circum- 
stances — it was manifest that the action of the last two Synods 
(the General and the Eastern), plainly meant that the work 
must now be done." All praise, especially to the Lancaster 
Synod of 1864; it knows what it means in this business; and 
it means now to have it done. 

Now then, first of all, for the agency to be employed in the 
resumption of the work. The old Committee is officially dead, 
and out of the way; tiuice plucked up by the roots; and after 
all its past offences, we might imagine, not to be thought of 
again in the present case. Let there be at least a wholesome 
reconstruction, leaving out a part of the old membership, and 
bringing into the room of it a new membership in sympathy with 
Dr. Bomberger. But can we believe our senses? This Lan- 
caster Synod reiterates the madness of the Easton Synod. It 



36 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



is the old Liturgical Committee, which is once more summoned 
to go forward with their old work. Not a man of them is ex- 
cused; and strangest of all, to fill the places of the Rev. Dr. 
Heiner and Elder Heyser (deceased), we find now added to the 
Committee the names of the Rev. Thomas G. Apple and Dr. L. 
H. Steiner ; men known by every body to be in no sympathy 
whatever with Dr. Bomberger in his late minority stand-point, 
but, on the contrary, in full sympathy with the majority stand- 
point opposed by him — and for that very reason also dignified 
with this appointment ! 

In this new commission, says Dr. Bomberger, "no instruc- 
tions are given for the guidance and government of the Com- 
mittee; but it is presumed, that no one will call in question the 
continued force of previous directions." That is (according to 
his monstrous hypothesis), after all that had gone before; after 
the Baltimore instructions, and the sense put upon them by the 
Committee; after the preparation of the Provisional Liturgy 
openly on this scheme; after the Easton instructions in regard 
to a revision, and the way in which these also were openly taken 
by the Committee ; and above all, after the strong, not to say 
extreme statement they had made of their views in the tract 
offered to the Synod of Chambersburg : after all this, we say, 
the Synod of Lancaster, now in 1864, having re-constituted the 
same Committee, and filled out its vacancies with men known to 
be of one mind with it in all it had been doing and trying to do 
thus far; and now saying to it, without farther direction, "Go 
on, and complete your work;" did not mean at all that they 
should follow out their past profession of principles and views, 
but intended just the opposite of this — namely, that they had 
been wrong all along, and were now expected to take up and 
perfect their unfinished work, in what Dr. Bomberger held to be 
the way the Church had wanted it from the beginning. Sim- 
ply to state the case, is to make it ridiculous. 

It is, in truth, sheer nonsense. The Synod knew perfectly 
well where the Committee stood in regard to the whole subject, 
and with this knowledge re-appointed them, and bid them re- 
sume their work, without one syllable of qualifying direction. 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



37 



How was it possible, in these circumstances, that the Committee 
should not take this for a full and formal authorization to go 
on as they had been doing before, and to perfect their work in 
its own order and kind, not by pulling it to pieces, but by bring- 
ing it into round unity and harmony within itself as an altar 
liturgy? They did so understand the Synod, and addressed 
themselves now vigorously to the task assigned them, with full 
determination to carry it out in this way. 

Dr. Bomberger, however, was still obstinate. When the Com- 
mittee met, he took his old ground again ; maintained that we 
were utterly mistaken in supposing our scheme of revision to be 
approved by the Church; contended that Synod had, in fact 
(God knows when or where), endorsed Ms scheme, as the only 
one to be thought of in the case; and wondered now, that all 
the rest of us should not give up at once to his single judgment, 
where we were so clearly wrong, and he himself so clearly right. 
We could not, of course, yield to this ; and after some friendly 
talk on the subject, it was concluded that we, who were the ma- 
jority, and the next thing to the whole of the Committee, should 
go on with the work of revision in our own way ; while Dr. Bom- 
berger would simply co-operate with us as far as he could, with- 
out being understood to recede at all from his protest against 
what seemed to him wrong. He himself urged us to go forward 
in this way; and for a time continued to work with us, as plea- 
santly as could be desired. 

But this did not last. ' As. the revision advanced, and gave 
promise of being successfully carried through in its own line, 
Dr. Bomberger found it more than he could stomach. His dis- 
content appears to have reached its climax, when the Committee 
reported progress to the Synod of Lewisburg, in 1865, and sub- 
mitted their new forms for common Sunday Service and for the 
Holy Communion, as specimens of the manner in which they 
were carrying on their work. "No opinion upon the merits of 
these forms," he says, "was expressed by Synod." This is 
very true. But this silence, in the circumstances, amounted to 
a great deal. Dr. Bomberger was there, and made a violent 
speech against the course the Committee were pursuing ; so elo- 



38 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



quently depicting the mischief which was to come of it, that 
one good brother, at least (innocent of much previous knowledge 
on the subject), was led to cry out, it is said, in a sort of panic 
fright, "Mr. President, can't we stop the Liturgy?" He tells 
us now, moreover, in his historical tract, that these very speci- 
men forms are the worst part of what he considers worthy of 
condemnation in the Revised Liturgy. The Lord's day service 
is, in his view, "intensely ritualistic;" and the Communion ser- 
vice is denounced as "essentially inconsistent with the devo- 
tional genius of the Reformed Church, and utterly irreconcilable 
with the apostolic and primitive conception of the ordinance;" 
although it is, in fact, in no particular point different from the 
form in the Provisional Liturgy, which this same Dr. Bomberger 
consented to in 1857, and publicly commended to the Church as 
being not only good, but very good — " nothing in the way of 
outward help being so well calculated indeed (in his full con- 
viction), to promote the worthy and comfortable observance of 
the Holy Supper, as the devout perusal" of just this service. 
These two pattern services, we say, the Synod had before it in 
1865 at Lewisburg, with the benefit of Dr. Bomberger's damna- 
tory criticism. And what now did the Synod do ? "Expressed 
no opinion!" we are told. Oh, no, nothing of that sort; only 
paid no attention to Dr. Bomberger's damnatory criticism ; and 
instead of stopping the Liturgy, ordered it on to completion. 
That was all the Synod did. 

That was enough, however, for Dr. Bomberger. He sent us 
word by letter afterwa.rds, that he could take no farther part 
with us in our work; we were not doing, he would still have it, 
what Synod wanted us to do; and so he would appeal to Synod 
against us when it next met. A sort of appellation, one might 
say, from Philip drunk, to the same Philip when it was hoped 
he might be sober. 

The Committee went on, and finished their work ; finished it 
greatly to their own satisfaction; not simply because they were 
through with it, but because they felt that they had been suc- 
cessful in bringing the book into a form suitable to the wants of 
the Church, and likely now to come at last into general use. 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 39 
« 

In this respect, my own feeling with regard to the Revised 
Liturgy was altogether different, from what it had ever been with 
regard to the Provisional Liturgy. 

Thus completed, the work was presented, with a very brief 
report, to the Synod, which met last October at York, under 
the title: An -Order of Worship for the Reformed Church. 
No sooner was this done, than Dr. Bomberger was on his feet 
again, to spring upon the house another of his unparliamentary 
interruptions, in the form of a long, elaborate, minority coun- 
ter-report; which was offered as an apology for his not having 
acted with the Committee, but amounted, in fact, to a wholesale 
onslaught upon the work itself, and a most libellous defamation 
of the views and motives of all, who had been concerned in 
bringing it out. A libel, which has since been repeated de- 
liberately and at large, in his history of what he calls the 
Ritualistic Movement in the German Reformed Church. It is 
wonderful with what effrontery, in this counter-report of his at 
York, he charges the entire Liturgical Committee (all except 
himself), as having been engaged, throughout, in a course of 
clear disobedience to the will and command of Synod, while he, 
singly and alone, had been laboring all along to set our re- 
fractory skulls right — but laboring, alas, in vain. He could 
not work with the Committee, it seems, because the Committee, 
ten against one, would not think as he did, but stubbornly in- 
sisted on thinking for themselves. Hence, these tears. "In 
this spirit, and for such reasons," he whines, "I come back to 
this Synod to-day from the mission upon which you sent me. 
I could not perform the duties of that mission in what I am 
most fully persuaded is the spirit and letter of your instructions, 
because my associates in the work" — thick-headed, stiff-necked 
jurymen as they all are — " would not aid me in such an execu- 
tion of our trust. I would not perform them in any other way, 
not even to gratify any most favorite, subjective, personal 
view3 and tastes, because I believed that to do so involved diso- 
bedience to my ecclesiastical superior," — the Synod, namely, 
which had been, all along, backing the Committee in their course—- 



40 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



"disloyalty to my Church, and infinite hazard to our spiritual 
peace and edification." 

The action of the Synod of York, on the Revised Liturgy, is 
comprehended in a special report, adopted in regard to it, which 
may be allowed to speak for itself. After a brief general re- 
view of the liturgical movement, and the instructions of Synod 
with reference to it from time to time, the report goes on to 
say of the Committee and their work, as follows: 

" These instructions, after much diligent labor, have been 
faithfully carried out, and, as the result of their labors, con- 
tinued for the last three years, embracing forty-five sessions in 
all, we have now before us the Revised Liturgy, printed and 
prepared for the examination of Synod. The work bears on 
its face the indications of unwearied patience and perseverance, 
of self-denying toil, of an elevated and devotional taste, of much 
study and reflection, and an undeniable purpose to serve the 
Church and the cause of Christ. It is questionable, whether 
more labor and earnestness of purpose have ever been bestowed 
on any similar work, in Europe or in this country." — "The 
Liturgy, now presented to the Church, is fully as much the 
work of the Synod as of the Committee. It must be conceded, 
that the Committee have acted with prudence and respect for 
the instructions of Synod, at each step they have undertaken 
in the prosecution of their labors, and that all along they have 
been prompted and urged forward in their work by the special 
action of the Synod. It is, therefore, the legitimate child of 
this Synod. Whether it will ever come into general use among 
our congregations or not, it is evident that for all time to come, 
it will be a monument to the learning, ability, piety, and devo- 
tion of its authors to the liturgical idea, which they have so 
well comprehended." 

Then follow these three resolutions : 

"1. Resolved, That our thanks are due, and are hereby ren- 
dered, to the great Head of the Church, that this work, so far 
as Synod is concerned with it, has been brought to a termina- 
tion." 

"2. Resolved, That the thanks of the Synod are hereby ten- 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



41 



dered to the Committee, for the zeal, ability, and unrequited 
toil, which they have displayed in the prosecution of their work, 
from the beginning to the end. 

" 3. Resolved, That the Revised Liturgy be referred to the 
General Synod for action, and that, in the meantime, the op- 
tional use of the Revised Liturgy be authorized, in the place of 
the Provisional Liturgy, within the limits of the Eastern Synod, 
until the whole question be finally settled by the various Classes 
and the General Synod, according to the Constitution of our 
Church." 

By this action, the new Liturgy came into the hands of the 
late General Synod at Dayton, in conformity with the order 
issued three years before, by the General Synod of Pittsburg; 
and now it was, that its friends were brought first fully to see, 
what manner of spirit it was that actuated and ruled the oppo- 
sition, which had begun to work against it. This opposition 
sought nothing less than the destruction of the young child's 
life. Although it had been declared all along, that it was such 
an order of worship as the people did not want, and never could 
be brought to receive with any sort of favor, yet, now that it 
stood there asking barely permission to live, and nothing more, 
it was felt that this would be unsafe. Who could tell what 
power might be slumbering in that gentle, peaceful form, after 
all? "Herod, and all Jerusalem with him, was troubled;" and 
so the fiat went forth, not openly altogether, but, as it were, in 
secret: "Let the Liturgy die, before it is well born; let it pass 
away as a hidden, untimely birth, and become thus as though it 
had never been." 

We have seen before, that permission had been granted to 
the Western Synod, to form a Liturgy of their own. They had 
not liked the Provisional Liturgy of the East ; let them get up, 
then, a different order of worship to suit themselves, and have 
it ready to present, also, to the next General Synod. They did 
put their hand to this task. A Liturgical Committee was ap- 
pointed to carry it forward; which also went bravely to work, 
and in due time got forth some interesting specimens of what 
they were able to do in this line. But there the movement 



42 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



came to an inglorious end. The specimen forms did not prove 
satisfactory, either to the public at large or to the Committee 
themselves. The Complete Manual, as it was christened before- 
hand, got no farther toward completeness; and so, when we 
came togother in General Synod at Dayton, we found no such 
work of the Western Synod there, but only an official act on 
their minutes, asking for more time to get it ready. 

What we did find there very soon, however, was a pretty 
general determination on the part of these Western brethren to 
put out of the way the Revised Liturgy of the Eastern Church, 
now happily brought within their clutches, as it might seem, 
for this very purpose. 

"Whence, we may well ask, such unbecoming animosity in 
breasts otherwise generous and good? Partly, of course, from 
what we may call the natural opposition of the Western reli- 
gious spirit to the whole idea of worship, under a liturgical 
form. But partly, also, beyond all doubt, from the factious in- 
dustry and zeal of Dr. Bomberger and his clique in the East ; 
who all along, but more especially of late, had been working upon 
this prejudice, and trying to persuade the Church in the West, 
that all things were going wrong in the Eastern Synod, both 
theologically and ecclesiastically; and that the salvation of the 
German Reformed Church, in America, now depended on the 
rising star of empire in the Synod of Ohio and the Adjacent 
States. This factious element had claimed, indeed, as we have 
seen, to be the reigning power in the Eastern Synod itself; but 
it had an uncomfortable sense still, of having been always, more 
or less, worsted there in its anti-liturgical conflicts; and it was 
a great satisfaction for it now, therefore, to think of joining 
hands with this ultramontane jealousy at Dayton, so as to roll 
off from the German Reformed Church, at once and forever, 
the reproach now resting upon it from the liturgical movement. 
ZSTo pains, accordingly, were spared, to win the political game. 
Dr. Bomberger's tract, on the Ritualistic Movement," was 
got out hastily, and circulated far and wide. The Western 
Missionary was set to sounding a continuous alarm on the same 
theme. Ominous, bad-sounding words, were made to fall on all 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



43 



sides upon the ears of the people. Appeals were addressed to 
their prejudices and their fears. All was done that could be 
done, to have the Liturgy prejudged and condemned, before it 
was either seen or read. 

We all felt this when we got to Dayton. There was an ele- 
ment at work around us, that boded no good, but harm only, 
to the new Order of Worship. The opposition to it was strong ; 
and it was called to give account of itself at what was, in one 
sense, a foreign bar. The Western delegation was full; the 
delegation from the East, especially in the case of the Elders, 
was only partially present. It was painfully evident, moreover, 
that the Western delegation itself had no power, as things stood 
in the West, to be entirely independent and free. Men could 
not vote in all cases as they might wish; but had to do it, in 
some cases at least, as they must. 

Still would the brethren of the Western Synod seriously join 
hands with a miserable faction of the Eastern Synod, to subvert 
at one blow, in such a case as this, a work which had cost this 
last so many years of care and labor ? That was hardly to be 
imagined beforehand ; and I must confess it filled me with sur- 
prise, when I found that this, and nothing less than this, was 
what these Western brethren really proposed to do. We had 
it all brought out at last in the minority report, as it was called, 
on the subject of the Revised Liturgy, which every effort was 
made to have substituted for the majority report allowing its 
optional use. In this minority paper, drawn up by Professor 
Good of Tiffin, a long show of reasons was offered to prove that 
the Liturgy would not answer for the use of the Church ; and 
on the ground of these reasons, preferred without any real exa- 
mination of the book, the Synod was now asked to give judg- 
ment against it, without farther knowledge or inquiry ; and to 
put it, along with the unfinished and abortive material of the 
Western Synod, into the hands of a new Committee ; who should 
then go on to cut and patch all, at their pleasure, into some un- 
known shape, which, it was hoped, might satisfy at last the litur- 
gical necessities of the German Reformed Church. 

Could any thing well be more ironically absurd ? It was more 



44 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



than absurd, however; it was monstrous. Only look at the 
case. Here was the Eastern Synod, which had been working 
now through seventeen years to make a Liturgy. Its best 
strength, talent, learning, piety, patience, and perseverance, had 
been expended upon the object. Finally, after so long a time, 
the movement was felt to be crowned with success. It had 
issued the Revised Liturgy, which was now submitted to 
the General Synod, according to previous order, with the 
proud feeling of a duty well performed. For no one presumed 
to call in question the general merits of the book. It was al- 
lowed on all hands to be of the first order in its kind. It was, 
in this respect, an ornament and honor to the Church to which 
it owed its being. And how, now, was it proposed to receive 
the work in the General Synod? The proposition, in plain 
English, was nothing more nor less than this; that the General 
Synod should take the work out of the hands of the Eastern 
Synod, and just then and there, without farther ceremony, crush 
it ignominiously out of existence. What ! without ever looking 
at it in the way of examination ? without giving it so much as a 
chance to be known and judged on its own merits? Exactly 
so ; let it perish without any troublesome and useless formality 
of this sort. But how is it expected that this can be done? 
Will the brethren of the Eastern Synod consent to be robbed of 
what has cost them so much, in such summary and ruthless 
style? It matters not; the book is now in the hands of the 
General Synod; only let the brethren of the West, by a sec- 
tional vote, join hand in hand with Dr. Bomberger and his com- 
pany, and they will be able, it is to be hoped, to do with it what 
they please. Still, on what plea is all this violence to be done? 
What crime is charged upon the Liturgy ? What evil has it 
wrought, to justify such wholesale rejection? How are those 
who are asked to join in this vote (ministers and elders), to 
know that it deserves such merciless treatment at their hands ? 
Their knowledge is not needed; their ignorance will answer just 
as well ; nay, the less they know of the matter, the better. They 
will be the more sure to vote then, as they are wanted to vote. 
Not one Western minister in ten, it is true, has examined the 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



45 



book ; not one Western elder in ten, probably, has so much as 
even looked into it. But what of all that ? Have they not Dr. 
Bomberger's word for it, that it is full of all sorts of mischief? 
Has he not published a tract to put it down ? Has not this been 
echoed by the "Western Missionary ?" Are not Professors Good 
and Rust, and Williard, all here to make speeches against it ? 
What need have we farther for witnesses? The power seems to 
be providentially in our hands. No time so favorable for the deed 
we meditate may ever occur again. Let the Revised Liturgy of 
the Eastern Synod die ! 

A beautiful spectacle truly, was it not, this attempt to turn 
the General Synod, at its second meeting, into an organ, through 
which the Synod of the West might be able to rule, as with a 
rod of iron, the mother Synod of the East! 

One cannot help wondering and asking, what would have 
come of the radical proceeding, if it had been crowned with suc- 
cess. How would the brethren have disposed of the Liturgy, 
once fairly in their hands ? It was to have gone into the hands 
of a new Committee, to be taken to pieces and reconstructed at 
their pleasure. But where was the Committee to be found for 
such work ? The old Committee, of course, could not have been 
thought of in the case; neither was it to be imagined that any 
member of it would consent to take part in the service, unless 
it were Dr. Bomberger. Still farther, no friend of the Liturgy 
in the Eastern Synod could have had any thing to do with it. 
It must have been, then, mainly a Western Committee, com- 
posed of such men as the Brethren Williard, J. H. Good, Rust, and 
M. Stern, in conjunction with Dr. Bomberger, and one or two 
others that may be imagined, from the East. The respectability 
of such a Committee, in itself considered, need not be called in 
question. But the idea of placing the finished work of the East- 
ern Synod in its hands, as so much material simply, along with 
the botched stuff previously prepared in the West, to be extem- 
porized now into new and better form ! Spectatum admissi ri- 
sum teneatis, amici? 

Our good Western brethren have reason to be thankful, that 
the farce was not allowed to play itself out to this ridiculous 



46 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



length. Some of them, no doubt, are already ashamed of what 
they tried to do at Dayton, and pleased with their own defeat; 
and it will not be strange at all, if before the meeting of the 
next General Synod in Philadelphia, the cause of the Liturgy 
shall be found to be quite as strong in the West, as it has now 
shown itself to be in the East. 

In the circumstances which have been described, it was a 
great victory that was wrought in favor of this cause at Dayton ; 
far beyond all it might appear to be to superficial observation. 
The friends of the Liturgy knew then, and know now, that the 
vote in its favor meant a great deal more than the difference 
simply of the yeas and nays recorded in it; and the enemies of 
the Liturgy know the same thing. The true significance of the 
vote lies in the fact, that it was a struggle of the East to save 
its own cause here, against a faction which sought, by help of 
the West, to destroy it — a struggle, at the same time, which had 
to be maintained on Western ground. In this character, the 
stand made in favor of the Liturgy was powerfully felt in the 
West itself. There was a moral superiority gained by the argu- 
ment in its behalf, which told upon the General Synod, and upon 
the outside community, with far wider and deeper effect than 
any counting of votes ; which has been working for good since, 
and which will continue to work for good still through a long 
time to come. But more important than all this, was the way 
the conflict served to bring out the thought and feeling of the 
Eastern Synod in regard to the great interest which was here 
at stake, and to show clearly where it stood, and intended to 
stand, on the issue which had been raised concerning it. The 
only vote that could be considered of material account in the case 
was the vote of the East, including the Westmoreland Classis. 
It was properly an Eastern question that was to be decided. 
The voice of the West in regard to it meant nothing; because 
it was uttered, to a large extent, in profound ignorance of the 
subject, and under the power of blind, unreasoning prejudice. 
The Liturgy belonged properly to the Eastern Synod ; was the 
child of the Eastern Synod; had its native home in the Eastern 
Synod; and by the judgment of the Eastern Synod was destined 



I 

OF THE NEW LIEURGY. 



47 



finally to stand or fall. In this view, as all may easily see, the 
vote of the Eastern delegation at Dayton was an overwhelming 
decision in its favor. What an extinguisher on Dr. Bomberger's 
slanderous tract; the burden of which is throughout, that the 
Liturgical Committee had obstinately refused all along to do 
what the Synod wanted them to do, and had now finally, with 
this Revised Liturgy of theirs, capped the climax of their dis- 
obedience, in a way which the Synod could no longer possibly 
endure. We have seen before how the action of one Synod 
after another, on to the very last one at York, had given 
the lie practically to this monstrous imagination. But never 
was this done to greater purpose than by the Eastern vote in 
favor of the new Liturgy at Dayton. Had the entire Eastern 
delegation been at hand, the vote would have been a great deal 
stronger. As it was, we all know in how meagre a minority it 
left Dr. Bomberger and his colleagues. Two of these colleagues, 
besides, were the delegates from the Classis of North Carolina ; 
which has been in a state of ecclesiastical secession from the 
Synod, ever since the present liturgical movement commenced; 
and whose representatives, therefore, allowed themselves, with 
very bad grace certainly, to be brought North at this time, for 
the purpose of meddling with it in any such factious way. Aside 
from these ciphers, the clerical vote on that side stood next 
thing to nothing. And it was little, if any thing better, with 
the lay vote. Our Eastern Eldership, after all the attempts 
which had been made to alarm their fears, and set them in array 
against their Ministers, went almost in a body in favor of the 
Liturgy. Shall we hear any thing more of a want of sympathy 
and good understanding between the Synod and its Committee, 
on this subject? 

What has just been said, does not mean, of course, that the 
Revised Liturgy has been endorsed and ratified, in form, by 
what was done in its favor at Dayton. The vote there, we all 
know, was not intended to do any thing of that sort. The time 
for any thing of that sort had not yet come. The vote meant 
simply, that the Liturgy should have fair play ; that, as a work 
of art, it should not be subjected to the vandalism of being 



48 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



made so much raw material merely, for the manufacture of 
another work (not of art), in the hands of Messrs. Good, Rust, 
Bomberger & Co. ; that the Eastern Synod should not be re- 
quired to stultify itself, by abandoning both the work and the 
Committee that made it, to the tender mercies of a fanatical 
crusade, got up to lynch it out of existence, without judge or 
jury; that after having been brought, through long years of 
learned and laborious preparation, under the eye and ordering 
hand of the Synod, to the perfect working form it had now 
reached, it should not be kicked to the one side by the ignorant 
prejudice of such as knew nothing about it, but should have, at 
least, the opportunity of coming before the people, to be tried 
by them on its own merits. This is what the action, at Dayton, 
meant nothing more. But this, in the circumstances, was 
much. Nobly has it served to redeem the honor of the Eastern 
Synod, and to vindicate the good name of its grossly calum- 
niated Liturgical Committee. 

So much for the historical defence of the Liturgy. How far 
the work itself, in the form in which it is now before the pub- 
lic, may prove satisfactory to the Church, remains yet to be 
seen. The Committee, with its friends generally, are quite 
willing to leave the settlement of that question where it properly 
belongs, with the people. They have no wish to force it into 
use in a single congregation. It is not felt that the honor, 
either of the Committee or of the Synod, depends, in the case, 
on what may become of the book, finally, in this way. Our ap- 
pointed service is done ; done faithfully, and to the best of our 
ability. We have got out at last, what we believe to be a good 
Liturgy, in good working order; and room is now made for its 
being put to practical experiment among our churches. If they 
find it to be what they want, and are willing to make use of it, 
either in whole or in part, it will be well. If they find it other- 
wise, and do not choose to adopt it, that will be all well too; 
nobody will have any reason to complain ; the thing will have 
taken its right course, and come to its conclusion in a fair and 
right way. That is all that is wanted or wished. 

Neither let it be imagined, that we object at all to having the 



OP THE NEW LITURGY. 



49 



Liturgy subjected to examination and criticism. If it cannot 
bear to have its merits fairly and honestly investigated in this 
way, it ought not to expect favor. What its friends complain 
of is, not that it should be put upon trial, but that it should be 
attempted to put it down without trial. Not that judgment 
should be exercised upon its merits, but that without any re- 
gard to its merits, it should be proposed to have it condemned 
and set aside on other grounds altogether. The Liturgy courts 
enlightened criticism; it deprecates only falling into the hands 
of ignorant prejudice or dishonest passion. 

The way is now open to pass on to the consideration of its 
theological character. 
4 



50 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



PART II. 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION OF THE NEW LITUKGY. 



The discussion on the Revised Liturgy, at the meeting of the 
late General Synod in Dayton, brought out clearly two things. 
It showed that the liturgical question, as it now has place among 
us in the Reformed Church, is in truth a doctrinal question of 
the deepest significance; and it showed also that as a doctrinal 
question it has to do, not with one or two points of theological 
opinion simply, but with theology in its universal view. 

This accounts for the earnestness with which the Liturgy is 
opposed by those who have set themselves against it. To some 
it has no doubt appeared strange, that the book should have 
become an object of such strong jealousy and dislike. For by 
general confession now, we are a liturgical branch of the 
Church ; we allow the propriety of prescribed forms of worship ; 
we hold it part of our Reformed right to use them, or not to 
use them, as to our congregations severally may seem best. 
In conformity with this freedom, we have been willing to let 
liturgies take their course among us heretofore, with little or 
no attempt at anything like ecclesiastical supervision or re- 
straint. Our ministers might use the old Palatinate Liturgy, 
or some irresponsible compilation handed down from the last 
century, or the Mayer Liturgy, or any other Liturgy they 
pleased ; nobody felt called upon to interfere; all were willing 
to let ministers and people judge for themselves what sort of 
service might best answer their wants. But in the case of our 
new Liturgy, all this tolerant indifference has suddenly come 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



51 



to an end. Even in its first imperfect form, as the Provisional 
Liturgy, the broad sanction of the Church, under which it ap- 
peared, was not sufficient to protect it from violent obloquy 
and assault. Pains were taken to create prejudice against it 
on all sides ; it could not be introduced, it was said, among 
our people ; and yet, strangely enough, its influence was depre- 
cated with ominous apprehension, as likely to work mischief 
far and wide. As the Revised Liturgy, it is now relieved of 
its first defects, and brought into easy working form. But 
this has only drawn upon it more apprehensive jealousy, and 
more active opposition, than what it had to encounter before. 
Hence the onset made upon it at Dayton. That was the cul- 
mination of a movement, which looked to nothing less than the 
violent suppression of the new Order of Worship before it was 
fairly presented to the churches. The churches, it was still 
said, could never be brought to receive it; but it was held dan- 
gerous, now more than before, to give them the opportunity of 
deciding that point for themselves. Not only must the book 
not be formally allowed ; it must be formally condemned and 
prohibited from use. The usual congregational liberty of the 
Reformed Church must here come to an end. For this Liturgy 
there could be no toleration. The opposition to it had grown 
virulent. It amounted to fanatical hatred. 

To some, we say, all this may have seemed strange. But it 
is accounted for by the theological life of the new Order of 
Worship. Had the book been a mere pulpit Liturgy, a collec- 
tion of dry forms for the use of the minister in the usual style 
of such mechanical helps, it would have called forth no such 
virulent opposition. But it was something altogether different 
from that. It carried with it the spirit and power of a true 
altar Liturgy ; and in this character it was felt to involve, not 
simply a scheme of religious service, but a scheme also of reli- 
gious thought and belief, materially at variance with precon- 
ceived opinion in certain quarters ; the sense of which then 
became instinctively, where such opinion prevailed, a feeling of 
antagonism to the whole work. Thus at our late General 
Synod, the liturgical discussion proved to be, in fact, an earnest 



^ 



52 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 

theological discussion, the interest of which extended far 
beyond the particular denominational occasion that gave rise 
to it. It was remarkable, indeed, that the opponents of the 
new Liturgy seemed to lay comparatively little stress on the 
mere ritual points, to which at other times they have taken 
exception. The question of responses, for example, hardly 
came into the argument at all. Every other consideration was 
for the time swallowed up by the question of doctrine. And 
here, again, the special was evidently ruled by the general. It 
was not so much dissatisfaction with t single doctrinal state- 
ments here and there in the Liturgy, as hostility rather to its 
whole doctrinal basis, that roused and led on the war for its 
destruction. The Liturgy represented one system of religious 
thought ; the opposition to it represented another ; the two con- 
stitutionally different, and mutually repellent. Hence the con- 
troversy. 

On the floor of the Synod, this controversy was met by the 
friends of the Liturgy with overwhelming success. The 
charges brought against it were shown to be untenable and 
false. Its doctrinal orthodoxy was triumphantly sustained. 
In the nature of the case, at the same time, this defence 
rebounded into the form of an attack upon the orthodoxy of 
the opposite side. It was shown that the offence taken with 
the Liturgy resulted from want of sympathy with the true idea 
of the Gospel, as this is owned and set forth in the forms of 
the Liturgy; and that the party opposing it was itself, there- 
fore, theologically unsound, as standing in the bosom of a sys- 
tem which, as far as it prevails, draws after it the rationalistic 
subversion of the Christian faith altogether. The real charac- 
ter of the system in this view, it may be added, cropped out 
actually, from time to time, in the speeches which were made 
from that side of the house; in a way that served, if not actu- 
ally to horrify, at least very seriously to startle, the better 
sensibilities of many, who had been brought up to believe dif- 
ferent things. 

What we propose now, is to bring this momentous issue 
between the Liturgy and its enemies into wider public view. 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



53 



Vast pains have been taken all along to disseminate doubts of 
its orthodoxy, and to create in this way a prejudice against it 
in the mind of the Church. Heretofore the way has not 
been open properly for meeting the loose, and always more or 
less indefinite charge. Now, however, the time seems to have 
come for laying aside all silence and reserve in regard to the 
subject. The theological character of the Liturgy has been 
challenged, in a style which makes it proper and necessary to 
confront the challenge. Our object in this article is immedi- 
ately and primarily its defence ; but all such defence, as we 
have just seen, is necessarily at the same time a polemical 
assault on the system of theological thinking, from which the 
challenge in question proceeds. Such is . the nature of the 
issue here joined. If the opponents of the Liturgy are sound 
in their theological premises, the Liturgy of course must be 
considered theologically unsound ; but if it should appear, that 
it is the Liturgy in fact which rests in sound premises, then we 
shall know with equal certainty, that the charge of unsoundness 
falls upon the other side. Our vindication in one direction, 
becomes thus, as a matter of course, crimination in another 
direction. We turn upon the theological enemies of the 
Liturgy their own charge. In the prosecution of our argu- 
ment, we shall cause it to appear that they are themselves une- 
vangelical, just where they call in question the evangelical 
character of the Liturgy. We shall be under the painful 
necessity of showing, that by their own concession, or in the 
way of unavoidable inference from their premises, they stand 
committed to views that are heretical in the worst sense of the 
term. 

Let it be understood, however, that this accusation is not 
preferred against the adversaries of the Liturgy indiscrimi- 
nately. We have limited the charge purposely to its theologi- 
cal enemies ; that is, to those who, consciously or unconsciously, 
hate and oppose the system of theological belief, in whose 
bosom it stands, and from whose inspiration it draws its life 
and power. We would fain hope, that even among these there 
may be some, whose minds are not closed absolutely against 



54 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



the truth, and who need only the help of some candid and dis- 
passionate inquiry to be made sensible of the danger of follow- 
ing blindly the prejudices by which they are now led. Beyond 
the range of all such theological opposition, however, there is 
a large amount of disaffection felt toward the Liturgy at pre- 
sent, which rests upon other grounds altogether. It is the 
result of misrepresentations industriously circulated, of fears 
blindly awakened, of prejudices adroitly played upon by party 
address- — all in profound ignorance, for the most part, of what 
the Liturgy actually is, and of what it proposes to do. With 
better information, much of this disaffection may be expected 
to disappear. The friends of the Liturgy, at all events, are very 
willing to have it put as widely as possible to this test. They 
only ask that it should be allowed to face all such popular pre- 
judice on its own merits. Let the people have an opportunity 
to judge for themselves, whether it be suitable to their wants 
or not. We do not shrink from this tribunal, even in our pre- 
sent theological argument. On the contrary, we appeal to it 
without fear. It was said on the floor of Synod, indeed, by 
one who opposed the Liturgy, that its theology was of too deep 
a character to be intelligible to the people. As if the people, 
forsooth, could not find themselves properly in the Creed, the 
Te Deum, the Lord's Prayer, the Litany, the Ten Command- 
ments, the Church Lessons and Collects, but only in the crea- 
tions, extemporaneous or otherwise, let down upon them in the 
usual style from the modern pulpit. We have no such low 
opinion of the capacity of our laity. In the case before us, 
many of them at least have theological instincts, which are 
better and safer than all scholastic speculations; to say nothing 
of traditional beliefs, which no logic can set aside. To these 
instincts and beliefs we now make our confident appeal. 

As already said, the doctrinal objections made to the Liturgy 
at particular points, refer themselves throughout to its general 
theology, the scheme or theory of Christianity, taken as a 
whole, in which its different parts are comprehended. A proper 
regard to order requires then, that we should direct our atten- 
tion first to this general scheme. Only after the theology of 



OP THE NEW LITURGY. 



55 



the Liturgy in such broad view has been vindicated, will the 
way be open for considering briefly the errors charged upon it 
in special instances. 

What, now, is the reigning theology of the Liturgy? It is 
sometimes spoken of in this country as the Mercersburg The- 
ology. But the system is far wider in fact than any such name ; 
and no name of this sort besides can give us any true insight into 
its interior character and constitution. What we need here, is not 
a distinctive title for the theology in question, but a distinguish- 
ing apprehension of its nature. For our present purpose it may 
answer to characterize it descriptively, (without pretending to 
exhaust the subject), under a threefold view. In the first 
place, it is Christological, or more properly perhaps Christo- 
centric; in the second place, it moves in the bosom of the 
Apostles' Creed; in the third place, it is Objective and Histori- 
cal, involving thus the idea of the Church as a perennial article 
of faith. These three conceptions are closely intertwined ; but 
they admit and deserve separate consideration. 

CHMSTOCENTRIC THEOLOGY. 

The term is sufficiently clear. It explains itself. We mean 
by it, of course, that the theology before us centres in Christ. 
He is not simply the author of its contents: these contents 
gather themselves up into Him ultimately as their root. As 
an object of faith and knowledge, and in the only form in 
which it can be regarded as having reality in the world, Chris- 
tianity has been brought to pass through the mystery of the 
Incarnation, and stands perpetually in the presence and power 
of that fact. All its verities, all its doctries, all its promises, all 
its life-giving forces, root themselves continually in the undy- 
ing life of Him, who thus became man for us men and for our 
salvation. And such being the actual objective constitution of 
Christianity, it would seem to be at once plain that our appre- 
hension of it, to be either right or safe, must move in the same 
order. It must plant itself boldly and broadly on the propo- 
sition, that Jesus Christ is the principle of Christianity, and 
that the full sense of the Gospel is to be reached only in and 



56 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



through the revelation which is comprehended in His glorious 
Person. In doing this it will become necessarily such a 
theology, such a way of looking at the Christian salvation, as 
we are now trying to describe. Learned or unlearned, it will 
be a theology that revolves around Christ as a centre, and is 
irradiated at all points by the light that flows upon it from his 
presence. 

For the right knowledge of things everywhere, all depends 
on their being surveyed from the right point of view. Facts 
and forms are not enough ; they must be apprehended in their 
true relations; and this requires that the beholder should 
occupy, in regard to them, such a centre of observation as may 
enable him to see them in this way. Even an outward land- 
scape, to be seen to advantage, must be seen from the proper 
position. So as regards any field or range of science. The 
astronomy of the old world, for example, abounded in obser- 
vation and study; was furnished with vast material of phe- 
nomena and facts; accomplished much in the way of scientific 
comparison, induction, and generalization. But it labored 
throughout with embarrassment and confusion, because its 
scheme of the heavens was projected from a wrong standpoint. 
It made the earth to be the centre of the system to which it 
belongs, and studied the motions of the heavenly bodies exclu- 
sively from this false assumption. It was geocentric, as we 
say, in its contemplations, and therefore every where at fault. 
The Copernican system, in the fulness of time, redeemed the 
science, and made room for its modern triumphs ; not primarily 
by the revelation of new facts, but by finding the true centre 
of observation for the apprehension of old facts. It planted 
its scientific lever in the sun, instead of the earth, bringing its 
studies thus into harmony with the objective order of the world it 
sought to understand and expound. Astronomy, in other 
words, ceased to be geocentric, and became heliocentric. Hence 
all its later enlargement and success. 

Now what this heliocentric (sun-centre) standpoint is for the 
right study of the heavens in the science of astronomy, we 
affirm the Christocentric (Christ-centre) standpoint to be, for 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



57 



the right study of heavenly and eternal things in the science 
of theology. No other standpoint can be substituted for it 
without boundless error and confusion. It is possible to bring 
in here a different centre of observation; nay, it is the natural 
vice of our fallen reason, that it tends continually to throw 
itself upon a different centre; for the full practical sense of 
what Christ is in this respect, belongs only to the world of 
faith, which as such is at the same time the world of what 
transcends all natural reason. We may have a simply anthro- 
pological divinity — a mere humanitarian theology ; all centering 
in the idea of man (anthropocentric); the earth again ruling 
the heavens, and the merely moral or ethical, at best, playing 
itself off as the divine. Or we may have, on the other hand, 
a simply theological divinity — a construction of theology start- 
ing from the idea of God, considered absolutely and outside of 
Christ (theocentric); in which the relations of God to the 
world, then, will become pantheistic, fantastic, visionary, and 
unreal; and all religion will be made to resolve itself at last 
into metaphysical speculations or theosophic dreams. How far 
these false projections of Christian doctrine, in one view antago- 
nistic, and yet in another everlastingly intermarried, have made 
themselves mischievously felt in the Christian world, through all 
Protean forms and shapes, from their first bad birth as Ebion- 
ism and Gnosticism, down to the Socinianism, Anabaptism, 
and metaphysical Calvinism of the sixteenth century, and 
down still farther to corresponding forms of religious thought 
in our own time — this is not the proper place to inquire. Our 
object is simply to fix attention on the possibility of such 
wrong constructions of Christianity, for the purpose of insist- 
ing with more effect on the necessity of a construction that 
shall start from the right point of observation ; and to make 
fully apparent, moreover, how much is comprehended in what 
we say, when we affirm that this right point of observation is 
the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that no theology, 
therefore, can be either safe or sound, or truly Christian, which 
does not show itself to be in this view a truly Christocentric 
theology. 



58 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



The proposition needs no proof. It is a first principle, a 
self-evident axiom, in Christianity. To doubt it, is to call 
Christ Himself into donbt. Has He not said: "I am the Light 
of the world"? Is it not His own voice that still rings through 
the ages from the isle of Patmos: "I am alpha and omega, the 
first and the last"? The natural world begins and ends in 
Him; for "all things were made by Him, and without Him 
was not anything made that was made" (John i. 3); and again 
we are told, "by Him were all things created that are in 
heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether 
they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers; all 
things were created by Him, and for Him; and He is before 
all things, and by Him all things consist" (Col. i. 16, 17). The 
ethical world, the movement of humanity, the world of history 
as it may be called, begins and ends in Him ; it is not chaotic, 
the sport of blind chance or iron fate ; Christ is in it, causing 
all its powers and forces to converge throughout to what shall 
be found to be at last the world's last sense in the finished 
work of redemption. Finally, the world of revelation begins 
and ends in Him; it is not a number of independent utter- 
ances, properly speaking, given forth from God, but a single 
economy or system, through which God has made Himself 
known among men, with progressive manifestation, in the way, 
not of doctrine primarily and immediately, but of act and 
deed ; the entire movement having its principle or root in 
Christ from the first, centering at last in the historical fact of 
the Incarnation, and running its course thence onward to the 
hour of His second appearing, when He shall come to be glo- 
rified in His saints, and admired in all them that believe. 
Jesus Christ is the alpha and omega of all these worlds 
(nature, history and grace), and as such the principle, centre 
and end, therefore, in which they all meet, and gather them- 
selves together finally, as one (Eph. i. 10). This being so, 
where shall we find the key to a correct knowledge of the 
world, or of man, or of God, if not in that which is set before 
us as the first object of the Christian faith, the mysterious con- 
stitution of His blessed Person ? Above all, what can we ex- 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



59 



pect to know rightly in the sphere of revelation (among the 
facts of the Bible, and amid the " powers of the world to 
come" that are lodged in the Church), without the help of this 
key? The Old Testament throughout has no sure sense or 
force, except in the Christological view of its being a subordinate, 
relatively imperfect discipline or pedagogy, whereby the way 
was prepared for the coming of Christ in the flesh. It has no 
power to explain or interpret Christ, save only so far as it is 
itself made intelligible first in and through Christ. Then, as 
regards Christianity itself, strictly taken, what is it, we may 
well ask, in difference from all else pretending to call itself 
religion, if it be not the product and outgrowth of the new 
order of life, which first became actual . in the world by the 
assumption of our human nature into union with the Divine 
Word (John i. 14, 17), having in this view its beginning, mid- 
dle, and end in Christ, and in Christ only? 

And how then, having such objective constitution, and standing 
thus actually and entirely in the historical being of Christ, beyond 
which it must necessarily resolve itself into nothing, as having no 
basis of faith whereon to rest ; being in such sort bound to Christ, 
we repeat, as the alpha and omega, sum and substance of its whole 
existence, how possibly shall Christianity be studied and under- 
stood aright, either practically or doctrinally, either as a sys- 
tem of life, or as a system of theology, if it be not in the 
Christocentric way of which we are now speaking ? To com- 
prehend the " world which, grace has made," we must take our 
position by faith in the great primordial centre, from which all 
has been evolved, and there fixing our spiritual telescope^ 
endeavor, as best we may, to scan the wonders thus offered to 
our contemplation ; being well assured that from any other 
centre, they will either not be seen at all, or else will be seen 
only under more or less distorted forms, and in more or less 
false relations and proportions. This centrality of Christ, in 
the Christian system, reaches forth to all parts of the system. 
Practically, all righteousness, all morality, all virtue, in the 
Christian sense, grow forth from the " law of the spirit of life 
in Christ Jesus." All sound Christian feeling and experience, 



60 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



flow from the sense of Christ formed in us as the hope of 
glory. And so intellectually also, Christ is our wisdom, the 
principle of all true Christian illumination and knowledge. 
Through Him only we are made to know man, his original 
destination, and the full extent of his fall. Through Him only, 
we come to have an insight into the true nature of sin, the 
power of the devil, the meaning of death, the idea of redemp- 
tion, and the progress of the Christian salvation out to the 
resurrection of the last day. Through Him only, do we ever 
come to the true understanding of God, "in the knowledge of 
whom standeth our eternal life." 

The theology now under consideration is decidedly of this 
character. It revolves around Christ. It has been strangely 
enough charged at times with subordinating the idea of Christ 
to the idea of the Church. But this is a gross mistake, if not 
a perverse slander. The theology in question does, indeed, lay 
stress on the doctrine of the Church, as stress is laid on it also 
in the Apostles' Creed; but only as the Church is held to be 
the necessary consequence of Christ (following the Creed in 
this also), and never as putting the Church in Christ's place. 
No theology in the country certainly has made more of Christ 
as the centre of its thinking and teaching. No theology has 
insisted more earnestly on the great cardinal truths of the 
Trinity, the Eternal Generation, the Divinity of the Son, the 
Incarnation, the Mediatorial "Work and Reign of Christ; and 
no theology, it may be safely asserted, has done more, within 
the same time, to awaken and enforce attention to the practical 
significance of these truths in the American religious world. 

This brings us to the consideration of what we have already 
named as its second distinguishing characteristic, namely; the 
fact, that it moves throughout in the bosom of the old Creeds, 
the original regula ficlei of the Christian world. 

RULED BY THE APOSTLES' CREED. 

It is not necessary to waste time here on the half-learned 
criticisms, we hear made continually, in certain quarters, on the 
title and origin of this symbol. We know that it was not com- 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



61 



posed strictly by the Apostles; that it took form gradually; 
that there were different Creeds in the first centuries ; and that 
among these, the formula used at Rome finally gained general 
credit in the fifth and sixth centuries, so as to become, for sub- 
sequent times, what is now denominated the Apostles' Creed. 
All this we know; but we know also, at the same time, that 
this final settlement upon the Roman form, involved no giving 
up or changing any where of a single point of faith ; that the 
different Creeds previously, were only variations of one and the 
same confessional theme ; that what was added to its utterance 
in any case, came in only as the explicit enunciation of what 
was included in it implicitly before; and that all in this way 
resolved itself into a common rule of faith, or canon of truth, 
which the universal Church held from the beginning as of 
Apostolic origin and Apostolic authority. In this character, 
the symbol has been received through all ages, by all branches 
of the Church, both Oriental and Occidental, as the primary 
and most fundamental expression of the Christian faith. Pro- 
testantism has claimed, from the beginning, to stand here on 
the same ground with Roman Catholicism. The Reformed 
Church, no less than the Lutheran, starts confessionally with 
the Apostles' Creed. Our own admirable Heidelberg Catechism, 
in particular, makes it, in form, the ground and rule of all it 
professes to teach in the way of faith. 

The Apostles' Creed thus is the deepest, and for that reason most 
comprehensive of all Christian symbols. It lies at the founda- 
tion of all evangelical unity ; it is the last basis and bond of 
comprehension in the conception of the Church. No sect 
refusing to stand on this basis, can have any right to claim 
footing in the Gospel, or fellowship with the Apostles. 

All right theological thinking then, as well as all true evan- 
gelical believing, must start where this fundamental form of 
faith starts, and keep step with it at every point as far as it 
goes. The reason of this is plain. It lies in the constitution 
of the Creed; which is no summary of Christian doctrine pri- 
marily for the understanding, but the necessary form of the 
Gospel, as this is first apprehended by faith ; a direct transcript, 



62 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



we may say, of what the Gospel is to the contemplation of 
the believer, turned wholly upon the Person of Christ. Such 
faith is necessarily ruled by its object; the Creed, in other 
words, must be Christological, must unfold itself, first of all, 
in the order of what are to be regarded as the fundamental 
facts of Christianity, growing forth from the mystery of the 
Incarnation. In such view, there is no room to speak of two 
or more different methods of faith for taking in the sense of 
the Gospel. As there is but one method of the objective move- 
ment of the Gospel in Christ Himself, so can there be only one 
method for the apprehension of it on the part of believers. 
That method we have in the Apostles' Creed ; and any attempt 
to set this aside, to substitute for it some different construction 
of first principles, or to subordinate its proper normative 
authority and signification to any later type of belief, must be 
looked upon at once as a serious falling away from the Gospel, 
and may be expected to result at last in the confusion and 
eclipse of faith altogether. 

All this the theology before us owns and holds steadily in 
view. Starting in Christ, it follows the order in which the 
facts of religion unfold themselves with necessary connection 
from His Person. This order is for it not optional simply, but 
is felt to be inwardly bound to its own principle. It is the im- 
manent logic of faith, determined by Him who is the central 
object of faith. It makes all the difference in the world in 
this view, whether a system of theological thought be cast in 
the type of doctrine that is set forth in the Creed, or con- 
structed in some other way. To some it may seem compara- 
tively indifferent, how the topics of religion are put together, if 
only the same topics nominally are made use of in the work; 
the form is of no account, they fancy ; all depends upon the 
matter. But this imagination itself shows at once the wrong 
position of those who hold it, and is really nothing less than 
a vast theological blunder. The form here is in fact every- 
thing; the matter nothing, we may say, except as embraced in 
this form. It is a vain pretence, therefore, to say, that the 
authority of the Creed is sufficiently acknowledged, by allowing 



OF TIIE NEW LITURGY. 



63 



it to be in substance a true, though defective, representation 
of the Gospel, and then going on to work up the material 
of it into some supposed better scheme of doctrine, project- 
ed from another standpoint altogether, and moving through- 
out in a totally different line of thought. No confession, no 
catechism, no preaching, no worship, no system of divinity, 
carried forward in this way, can ever breathe the spirit of the 
Creed, or have in it the true life of the Creed ; however much 
it may try to make the world believe that it is at the bottom 
in harmony with the "undoubted articles of our Christian 
faith," as we have them set forth in this radical symbol. 

Hence it is, that where such pretended reconstructions of the 
material of faith prevail, the honor shown to the Creed is in 
fact nominal only, and theoretic at best, and never practically 
real. We all know how completely the symbol has fallen out 
of use, in all those portions of the Church, in which such 
reconstructed divinity has come to have the upper hand. Evi- 
dence enough, what a difference it makes, whether our religion 
grow forth, or not, from this "form of sound words," delivered 
unto us from the Apostles. The difference reaches into all 
spheres of practical Christianity; into family religious train- 
ing; into the Sunday-school; into the work of catechetical 
instruction; into the character of preaching; into all sanctua- 
ry services; into all devotional offices. In the same way it 
reaches to every point of doctrinal Christianity. There is not 
a Christian dogma, that is not affected by it in the most serious 
manner. 

The theology of the Creed does not stop short, of course, 
with the few, primordial articles of that first, immediate pa- 
noramic vision of faith. Within the range of this regulative 
scheme, it finds room for any amount of scientific study and 
enlargement, through the use of what matter is offered to it for 
this end in God's Revelation, and in the exercise of a reason 
that is now purified for its office by the inspiration of God's 
Holy Spirit; the very element, as it were, of the world of faith 
in which the Gospel is here felt to move. But through all such 
enlargement, the organization of doctrine remains rooted and 



64 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



grounded in the objective mystery of the new creation in Christ 
Jesus, as this has been first apprehended in the form of the 
Creed ; and every doctrine is an outgrowth from this, having 
thus its position, complexion and quality in the system, both 
for faith and for knowledge, as it could not possibly have them 
in any other way. Every doctrine, in this way, becomes 
Christological, and serves to express a truth which is true only 
within the orbit of the Creed, and not at all on the outside of it. 

It would be interesting to verify this in particular cases, by 
showing how the doctrine of the atonement, for example, the 
article of justification by faith, the idea of regeneration, the 
conception of sacramental grace, are found to be always some- 
thing materially different in the theology of the Creed from 
what they are made to be in any other theology; but it would 
carry us too far for our present purpose, to pursue the subject 
in this way. We have said enough to show of what immense 
account the characteristic is, by which the theological system 
we are now defending is distinguished as being the theology of 
the Creed ; and what a gulph of separation this necessarily 
involves, between it and all antagonistic theologies; which, 
however loud mouthed they may be in the use of cant evangeli- 
cal shibboleths, stand convicted, nevertheless, of being pro- 
foundly un evangelical, just because they show themselves want- 
ing in every sort of genuine sympathy and loyalty for the 
Apostles' Creed, through which the original voice of the Grospel 
has come sounding down upon us from the earliest times. 

The theology we are defending may be said to be specially 
identified with the honor of the Apostles' Creed, in the religious 
history of this country. In our Reformed Zion, twenty-five 
years ago, the Creed had become almost a dead letter. It still 
kept its place in the Heidelberg Catechism ; but that itself was 
in a fair way to have its life smothered out of it, by the incubus 
which had come to settle upon it in the form of Methodistic 
Puritanism; and for the fundamental significance of the gem it 
here held enshrined in its bosom, there appeared to be but small 
sense anywhere. The Creed was not heard commonly in our 
pulpits, and had fallen into neglect largely in our families. 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



65 



Now, however, all is changed. The voice of the old symbol is 
once more restored. Our children are familiar with it. Along 
with the Lord's Prayer, it has forced itself into general liturgi- 
cal use among us, even where the new Liturgy is still feared 
for the theological spirit that has wrought such auspicious 
change. 

For can there be any doubt of the source from which this 
great change has sprung? Do we not owe it entirely to the 
Christological tendency, that has been at work among us for 
the last twenty years ; which was so much assisted in its own 
development by the study of the Creed ; and which at the same 
time wrought effectually to restore this to popular confidence and 
use? 

And no one, who has observed attentively the course of things, 
can doubt, but that the power of this testimony has been felt, 
also, far beyond the narrow limits of our Reformed Church. 
There is a deplorable want of real sympathy still with this 
archetypal form of sound words, on all sides ; but, a reactionary 
feeling has begun to set in evidently in its favor. It would 
be hard probably to find now, even in Puritan New England 
itself, any respectable so called Orthodox voice, prepared to 
say, as the pious "Puritan Recorder" could venture to do in 1849, 
that the Apostles' Creed has become, for the orthodoxy of New 
England, a "fossil relic of by gone ages" — a dead formulary, 
which "teaches in several respects anti-scriptural doctrines," so 
that it must be pitiful, therefore, to think of "infusing life into 
it, and setting it up again as a living ruler in the Church." A 
change, we say, has begun to come over the spirit of that 
dream ; and our theology unquestionably has had something at 
least to do with bringing it about. No other theology in the 
country, certainly, has labored more to re-animate the symbol 
with its pristine life. No other has so borne it on high as the 
chosen banner of its faith. And we will acid also in good trust, 
of no other is there more room to say, In hoc signo vinces. 



5 



66 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



OBJECTIVE AND HISTORICAL. 

Starting in the great fact of the Incarnation, and following 
its movement, our theology has finally the third general charac- 
ter of heing Objective and Historical. In other words, it is not 
a system simply of subjective notions, a metaphysical theory of 
God and religion born only of the human mind, a supposed ap- 
prehension of supernatural verities brought into the mind in 
the way of abstract thought; but it is the apprehension of the 
supernatural by faith under the form of an actual Divine mani- 
festation in and through Christ, which, as such, rules and 
governs the power that perceives it, while it is felt also to be 
joined in its own order to the natural history of the world on- 
ward through all time. So much lies at once in the Apostles' 
Creed. 

All revelation is primarily something that God does — an ob- 
jective, supernatural manifestation, which causes His presence 
to be felt in the world. The right apprehension of what is thus 
exhibited, which can be only through the inspiration of His 
Spirit, becomes then the power of His word in the souls of 
those to whom it is addressed. Universally, it would seem, the 
inward illumination is bound to the outward manifestation in 
this way. God does not speak to the souls of men immediately 
and abruptly, as enthusiasts and fanatics fondly dream; that 
would be magic, and gives us the Pagan idea of religion, not 
the Christian. The order of all true supernatural teaching is, 
the objective first, and the subjective or experimental after- 
wards, as something brought to pass only by its means. Most 
of all, we may say, is this true of Christianity, the absolute 
end of all God's acts of revelation. Its whole significance is 
comprehended, first of all, in the Divine deed, whereby God 
manifested Himself in the flesh, through the mystery of the In- 
carnation. This objective act is itself the Gospel, in the pro- 
foundest sense of the term. In the very nature of the case, it 
must underlie and condition all that the Gospel can ever be- 
come for men, in the way of inward experience. True, it can- 
not save men without their being brought to experience its 
power; on which account it is, that we need to be placed in 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



67 



communication with it through faith ; but the power that saves 
is not, for this reason, in our experience or faith ; it is wholly 
in the object with which our faith is concerned. The subjec- 
tive here, sundered from the objective, can give us at best only 
a spurious evangelicalism, which will always be found, in the 
end, to be more nearly allied to the flesh than to God's Spirit. 

Apprehended under such objective view, the revelation which 
God has been pleased to make of Himself through Jesus Christ 
(not in the way of oracle but of act), becomes necessarily, for our 
faith, at the same time historical. Only so can it be felt to be 
real, and not simply notional and visionary. Its objectivity it- 
self implies, that it has entered permanently into the stream of 
the world's life, not just as the memory of a past wonder, but 
as the continued working of the power it carried with it in the 
beginning. The Gospel is supernatural; but it is the super- 
natural joined in a new order of existence to the natural; and 
this, it can be only in the form of history. In any other form, it 
becomes shadowy and unreal. Sense for the objective in Chris- 
tianity, leads thus universally to sense for the historical ; while 
those who make all of subjectivity are sure to be unhistorical. 

The historical character of the Gospel, objectively considered, 
meets us, first of all, in the Person and Work of Christ Him- 
self, as they are exhibitedlb us in the Creed. Its articles are 
not so many theological propositions loosely thrown together, 
but phases that mark the progress of what may be considered 
the dramatic development of His Mediatorial Life, out to its 
last consequence in the full salvation of His people. This, of 
itself, however, involves then, in the next place, as we may at 
once see, the historical character of Christianity also, regarded 
as the carrying out of this mystery of godliness among men to 
the end of time. Not only the subjective religious experiences 
and opinions of men here are to be regarded as entering into 
the general flow of history, like their political or scientific 
judgments, but the objective reality, from which Christianity 
springs, the new order of existence which was constituted for 
the world by the great fact of the Incarnation, must be allowed 
also to be historical. Only in such view can we possibly retain 



68 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 

our hold on the objectively supernatural, as it entered into the 
original constitution of the Gospel. It is not enough for this 
purpose, to have memories only of what was once such a real 
presence in the world. It lies in the very conception of the 
Gospel, in this objective view, that its supernatural economy 
should be of perennial force, that its resources and powers of 
salvation should be "once for all;" not in the sense of some- 
thing concluded and left behind, as many seem to imagine, but 
in the sense of what, having once entered into the life of the 
world, has become so incorporated with it as to be part of its 
historical being to the end of time. 

But this conception of a supernatural economy having place 
among men under an objective, historical form, an order of 
grace flowing from Christ, and altogether different from the 
order of nature, is nothing more nor less than the idea of the 
Holy Catholic Church as we have it in the Creed. We can see 
thus how it is, that this article holds the place assigned to it in 
that symbol. It is not there by accident or caprice. It is 
there as part of the faith, which is required to take in the ob- 
jective, historical movement of the grace that is comprehended 
in our Lord Jesus Christ ; and it meets us exactly at the right 
point, as setting forth the form and manner in which Christ, by 
the Holy Ghost, carries forward His work of salvation in the 
world. If we are to hold fast the objective, historical character 
of what this work was first, and still continues to be, in His 
own Person, it cannot be allowed to lose itself in the agency of 
the Spirit under a general view; it must, necessarily, involve 
for us the conception of a special sphere; this likewise objective 
and historical; within which only (and not in the world at 
large), the Holy Ghost of the Gospel is to be regarded as work- 
ing. This is the Church. It comes in just here as a necessary 
postulate of the Christian faith. Standing in the bosom of the 
Creed, we cannot get round it. It is a mystery, like all the 
other articles of the symbol, which we are required to believe, 
because it flows with necessary derivation from the coming of 
Christ in the flesh. Our belief in it is not founded in our em- 
pirical knowledge of it, our having come to be sure of its ex- 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



69 



istence and attributes in some other way. In that case it would 
not be faith at all in the sense of the Creed. What faith has to 
do with properly, here as elsewhere, is the supernatural belonging 
to its object; and that comes to us, not in the way of natural 
experience and observation, but only in the way of a 'priori 
challenge and demand addressed to us directly from its own 
sphere. We do not believe, as the old adage has it, because 
we understand, but we believe in order that we may understand. 
Where there is no faith of this sort in the Church, going before 
all inquiries in regard to what it is and where it is for outward 
view, it is not to be expected that these inquiries can be carried 
forward with much earnestness or effect. We may not be able 
to explain fully the meaning of our Saviour's descent to hades, 
or the time and manner of His second advent ; but that is no 
reason why these articles should not be firm objects of our 
faith; we believe them, because they are felt to be involved in 
the objective movement of the Gospel itself in Christ's Person. 
And just so we believe the Church. We cannot get along 
without it, in our conception of the real, objective, historical 
working of Christ's Mediatorial Life in the world. This must, 
to be real at all, have a sphere of its own ; which, as such, be- 
comes, then, an order or constitution of grace, in distinction 
from the world in its simply natural constitution; exactly what 
we mean by the Church as an article of faith, back of all ques- 
tions in regard to its outward organization and form. We 
cannot get along without it, we say, in the objective movement 
of the Creed. Do away with it, as modern spiritualists require, 
and this movement is, for our faith, brought suddenly to an 
end. It is either sublimated into magic, or precipitated at 
once into the order of mere nature. 

The theology we are speaking of, then, is churchly. It be- 
lieves in the Church, as we have the article in the Apostles' 
Creed ; believes in it as a mystery, which comes in necessarily 
just where it stands in the Creed, as part of the ongoing move- 
ment of the general mystery of salvation, that starts in the In- 
carnation. It believes in an economy of grace, a sphere of su- 
pernatural powers and forces flowing from the historical fact of 



TO 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



Christ's birth, death, and glorification, which are themselves 
present in the world historically (not magically), in broad dis- 
tinction from the economy of nature ; and in the bosom of 
which only, not on the outside of it, the Gospel can be expected 
to work as the wisdom of God and the power of God unto sal- 
vation. So far as this goes, of course, it owns and confesses 
that the Church is a medium of communication between Christ 
and His people. They must be in the order of His grace, in 
the sphere where this objective working of His grace is actually 
going forward, and not in the order of nature, where it is not 
going forward at all (but where Satan reigns and has his own 
way), if the work of redemption and sanctification is to be car- 
ried forward in them with full effect. In this sense, most as- 
suredly, salvation is of the Church, and not of the world ; and 
to look for it in the world, by private spiritualistic negotiations 
with God, professedly and purposely pouring contempt on the idea 
of all church intervention, is to look for it where it is not to be 
found. 

This, of course, means a great deal; and draws after it, in 
the way of necessary consequence, much that we cannot now 
think of noticing in detail. A churchly theology can never 
run in the same direction with a theology that is unchurchly; 
and can never breathe the same spirit. Not because it makes 
less of Christ, as this last is ever ready to charge ; but because 
it makes more of Christ, and cannot consent to have Him turned 
into a Gnostic phantom. Not because it is less evangelical, as the 
unchurchly spirit, with great self-complacency, is forever prompt 
to assume ; but because it rests in a more profound and com- 
prehensive apprehension of the Gospel. 

Such a churchly theology, we feel at once, can never be 
otherwise than sacramental. Where the idea of the Church 
has come to make itself felt in the way now described, as in- 
volving the conjunction of the supernatural and the natural 
continuously in one and the same abiding economy of grace, 
its sacraments cannot possibly be regarded as outward signs 
only of what they represent. They become, for faith, seals 
also of the actual realities themselves, which they exhibit ; mys- 
teries, in which the visible and the invisible are bound together 



OF TIIE NEW LITURGY. 



71 



by the power of the Holy Ghost (not physically or locally, as 
vain talkers will forever have it), in such sort, that the presence 
of the one is, in truth, the presence of the other. 

In the end, also, unquestionably, the sacramental feeling 
here cannot fail to show itself a liturgical feeling. There is an 
inward connection between all the forms of religious thinking 
we have had thus far under consideration. They run into one 
another, and require one another to be in any sense, complete. 
A theology which is truly Christocentric, must follow the 
Creed, must be objective, must be historical; with this, must 
be churchly ; and with this again, must be sacramental and 
liturgical. It must be liturgical, moreover, in a sense agreeing 
with these affinities throughout — the only sense, in fact, in 
which it is not absurd to talk of worship in this form. It can 
never be satisfied with anything less than an altar liturgy. A 
mere pulpit liturgy, a hand-book of forms for the exclusive use 
of the minister, must ever seem to it, in comparison, something 
very unrefreshing, not to say miserably cold and dry. 

The enemies of the new Liturgy are right, then, in saying, 
that it is the product of the general scheme of theology we have 
now tried to characterize and describe, and that the spirit of 
this theology pervades, more or less, all its offices and forms. 
For this reason it is, in truth, that they dislike it, and would 
be glad to get it out of the way. Standing, as they do, in 
another order of religious thought altogether, they feel that the 
Liturgy is against them, and their instinct of self-preservation, 
as it were, impels them to seek its destruction. In this way, 
our liturgical controversy is, in reality, a great theological con- 
troversy; one that should be of interest to other Protestant 
Churches, no less than to our own. We see in it two general 
schemes of theology ; two different versions, we may say, of the 
meaning of Christianity ; two Gospels, in fact, arrayed against 
one another, with the feeling on both sides, that if one be true 
the other must necessarily be wrong and false. One of these 
schemes is the theology we have been thus far trying to de- 
scribe; the other is the opposite of this, the Puritanic un- 



72 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



churchly scheme, we may call it, in which the enemies of the 
Liturgy now openly stand. 

ANTI-LITURGICAL THEOLOGY. 

And what, now, is this Puritanic scheme ? It admits within 
it different constructions, Calvinistic, Arminian, Methodist, 
Baptistic, and so on in all manner of sect forms; but what we 
are concerned with here is only its general character, the under- 
lying common basis of these distinctions, as this presents itself 
to our view in broad contrast with the general character of the 
scheme we have just been considering. And even this general 
view must be taken at present in a very cursory, wholesale way. 
It will be sufficient, however, we trust, to show all unprejudiced 
persons, whose image and superscription the system in question 
bears, and in the service of what cause it works. 

What, we ask again, is this Puritanic scheme, which finds a 
"serpent" in the new Liturgy, and sees in it only a poisoned 
chalice offered to the lips of the people? We will now answer. 

It is a scheme, which betrays itself at once by its apostacy 
from the primitive regula fidei of the Christian Church, the 
Apostles' Creed. We know how it is ready at times, especially 
in our German- Churches, to squirm under this charge, and how, 
like some slimy eel, it tries to slip from beneath it with every 
sort of disingenuous evasion. But we mean now to hold it 
tightly to the accusation; and to do this before the people (the 
elders especially and laity in general of the Reformed Church), 
so that all may be able to see and know just what this false 
popular evangelicalism means, and in what direction it leads. 
It is constitutionally and inwardly at war with the Creed. It 
cannot frame its mouth to pronounce the symbol in its true 
original sense ; but claims the right of putting into its articles, 
where it may please, a better modern sense of its own. 

Hear, on this point, the " Puritan Recorder," in 1849. The 
Puritans, it says, receive the Creed "in a sense consonant with 
their theology," either leaving out altogether, for example, the 
article of the descent to hades, or putting upon it a constrained 
meaning to suit themselves. "But it is neither safe nor expe- 



OF THE NEW LITURGY". 



73 



client," the Recorder honestly adds, "to receive such a docu- 
ment in such a perverted sense; for the document once being 
admitted, and its authority being made to bind the conscience, 
then the way is open for those who hold the errors held by its 
authors, to plead that we are bound to receive it in the sense 
which its authors gave to it, and this makes it an instrument of 
corrupting the faith of the Gospel." Honest confession ! True 
divination ! The voice of the Creed allowed to proclaim itself 
from week to week, without note or comment, in the churches 
of New England, would, in the course of a few years, we verily 
believe, sap the foundations of their existing orthodoxy, and 
turn the stream of their church life into a wholly new channel. 
But any such use of the Creed among them now would be cried 
down as a Romanizing tendency or a hankering after ritualism ; 
as it would be also still, in spite of the little reactionary move- 
ment we see working here and there the other way, in all 
branches of American Presbyterianism. In these ecclesiastical 
regions, Puritanism has killed the Apostles' Creed out of all 
practical and theological use. It has become for them a dead 
letter, in family and school, in the pulpit and in the divinity 
hall. Let the thoughtful, everywhere, consider well what this 
means. We speak plainly, because the fact is plain. 

In our Reformed Church, especially since the theological re- 
vival we have had among us these last years, no tongue would 
dare to wag itself against the Creed in the fashion of the "Puri- 
tan Recorder." With us now at least, the symbol is no dead 
letter, but a living witness of Apostolical truth. So our people 
are coming to regard it more and more. But the Puritanic 
spirit is still among us to a certain extent ; and as far as it is 
so, it remains true still, in Jesuitical disguise, to the outspoken 
confession of the Recorder, that the Creed can be mouthed by 
modern evangelicalism only in a galvanized, so-called non- 
natural sense. 

Were we not told as much as this, to all intents and pur- 
poses, on the floor of the late General Synod, at Dayton ? Was 
not the ground there taken by the enemies of the Liturgy, that 
we had nothing to do with the faith of the third and fourth 



74 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



centuries, the birth-period of the Creed in its full development, 
as we now have it; that the faith of that time is not to be con- 
sidered normative or regulative, in any sense, for the faith of 
the modern Christian world; that the only primitive faith we 
are to follow, is what we can get out of the Bible directly for 
ourselves (every man thus following his own nose), without re- 
gard at all to any such objective form of sound words as we 
find employed to set forth the fundamental belief of Christen- 
dom in the first ages? This, of course, was a blow struck at 
all confessionalism ; bringing down our Reformed platform, at 
one stroke, to a flat level with the lowest forms of sectarian 
subjectivity, and involving us with general confusion in the 
brotherhood of Anabaptists, Socinians, Quakers, Muggleto- 
nians, United Brethren, Winebrennerians, Mormons (for these, 
too, prate of the Bible in the same Cambyses vein), and others, 
out to the end of the chapter. Hence, we had, in part, a 
change of base; the authority of the Creed insidiously assailed 
from the authority of the Heidelberg Catechism; the faith of 
the Primitive Church required to shape itself here into con- 
formity with what was represented to be the faith of the six- 
teenth century. A modern confessionalism in this way made 
to rule out the sense of the older confessionalism, in which, 
nevertheless, it professed to have its own root and ground! 
Did we not hear this nonsense gravely held forth at Synod? 
Were we not told there, that we are to take the Creed only in 
the sense of the fathers of the sixteenth century, and not in the 
sense of the fathers who first used it in the second and third 
centuries, if this last sense should be found not to square ex- 
actly with the sixteenth-century sense, as it was quietly granted 
might be the case? On the supposition, in other words, of 
even a casual discrepancy anywhere between the Creed and the 
Heidelberg; Catechism, it was held that the sense of the Cate- 
chism must rule, that is, literally coerce, the sense of the 
Creed ; in such way, that the modern symbol shall be held to 
be of primary normative force, and the primitive oecumenical 
symbol of only secondary derivative force as taken up into its 
bosom. How superlatively absurd ! What plainer proof could 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



75 



we have of hostility to the Creed, than the cloven foot thus un- 
ceremoniously thrust upon our view? Cannot the people see 
it everywhere with their own eyes? The matter may be put 
into a nutshell. Either the Creed, in its original unsophisti- 
cated sense, is what the Universal Church in past ages held it 
to be, the one only true radix and ground type of Christian 
faith and doctrine; or else it is not this, but a bastard cor- 
ruption of the Gospel, requiring to be tinkered into new sense 
at least, if not new form, before it can pass muster as fairly 
evangelical, in the modern party sense of this much-abused 
term. These are the two alternatives, without the possibility 
of any middle ground for even a rope-dancer to stand upon. 
Where they stand, whose acrobatic performances with the sub- 
ject at Synod have just been noticed, needs no demonstration. 
They do not own the Creed, in its own proper historical sense, 
for the original, necessary, and radically sure norm of our Re- 
formed faith; but take it only, in the way the "Puritan Re- 
corder" took it in 1849, as being, "most of it, capable of a sense 
which harmonizes with the Scriptures," going on then to rectify it 
to their taste, by distilling into it their own fancies, or what they 
are pleased to consider the elixir of sound thinking drawn from 
some other quarter. That is, in plain English, the Creed is 
not for them the ultimate symbolical authority of the Reformed 
Church; and the fathers of the sixteenth century must be re- 
garded as saying what was not true, when they pretended to 
look upon it in that light. These modern sons of theirs know 
better now, and have changed all that. 

But what now have our people, as a body, to say to the issue, 
thus fairly made up and brought before them ? Will they allow 
their first symbol, the marrow and kernel of their confessional 
faith, to be ruthlessly torn from their grasp by this Puritanic 
enemy, which has stolen in upon us while men slept, and now 
threatens to rob us of all that is fairest in our theology or 
church life? Are we to hold on to the Apostles' Creed with 
good faith, taking it in its own true sense; or shall we have in 
place of it only a dead corpse of the Creed, eviscerated of its 
own true sense, and hypocritically hold this up as an argument 



76 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



of our fealty to the ancient symbol? Are these old primeval 
articles, this grand architectonic scheme of the everlasting Gos- 
pel, to be for us no longer of undoubted catholic or universal 
authority, as the whole is declared to be in the Heidelberg 
Catechism ? Will the Reformed Church recognize the voice of 
her true teachers, in those who counsel, directly or indirectly, 
any such falling away from the faith of the fathers ? The ap- 
peal is to the people. Let the people answer. 

But we are not done yet with this anti-liturgical theology. 
Its opposition to the Creed shows, of course, a constitutional dif- 
ference between it and the whole conception of the Gospel con- 
tained in this ancient symbol; and from what we have seen 
already of this, we need have no difficulty in apprehending 
wherein the difference consists, and to what it amounts. The 
difference lies just here, and we wish all to ponder and consider 
it well : The Gospel of the Creed is, throughout, Christologi- 
cal, concentrates itself in Christ, throws itself, in full, upon the 
Incarnation, and sees in the objective movement of this Mys- 
tery of Godliness, as St. Paul calls it, the whole process of 
grace and salvation on to the resurrection of the dead and the 
life everlasting ; while this other scheme, which we now call, 
for distinction's sake, the Gospel of Puritanism, substitutes for 
all this a construction of Christianity that is purely subjective, 
centering in the human mind, and that gives us then notions 
for facts, causing metaphysical abstractions to stand for the 
proper objects of faith, and thus resolves all religion finally into 
sheer spiritualism ; in which no account is made of any objective 
mediation of grace outside of men, but every man is supposed 
to come directly, face to face, with God, having, in his evan- 
gelical notions simply, whatever is necessary to give him free 
access to the Divine presence. 

The charge of not preaching Christ, we know, is one which 
this theology will be ready to resent on all sides, as the last 
that should be seriously preferred against it. It is accustomed 
to please itself with the imagination of being evangelical, for 
the very reason that it pretends to make everything of Christ 
and Him crucified, and in certain of its phases at least is for- 



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77 



ever ringing changes on the themes of righteousness and free 
redemption through His name. Is not this the very boast of 
our unchurchly sects, all the land over, that they preach Christ, 
and Christianity, in opposition to such as lay stress on the idea 
of the Church, on the sacraments, on outward forms in any 
view; denouncing every intervention of this sort, as exter- 
nalism, ecclesiastfcism, sacerdotalism, ritualism, or something 
equally bad, that serves only to obscure the Saviour's glory, 
and to block up the way to His presence ? Who in the world 
do preach Chris% it may be asked, if it be not these sects, for 
whom Christ is thus, nominally, all in all ? 

This we understand. It is an old song ; as old as the Gnos- 
tics and the Phrygian Montanists, in the days of Tertullian. 
But we are not to be deceived by it for a moment. Try the 
spirits, says St. John ; do not take them at their own word ; 
try them whether they be of God. And he gives us a simple cri- 
terion for the purpose, applicable to all times (1 John iv : 1-3). 
They come preaching Christ of course. How else could they 
claim to be Christian ? But what sort of a Christ is it that they 
preach ? Is it the historical Christ of the Incarnation. Do 
they confess that "Jesus Christ is come in the flesh," not in 
appearance only, and not for a season only, but in full reality 
and for all time ? Or is their confession of that spiritualistic 
sort, that resolves His coming in the flesh into a mere specula- 
tive dream, long since sublimated in the clouds ? In this last 
case, St. John tells us, its boasting of Christ cannot save it. It 
is not of God, but is the very spirit of Anti-Christ, just because 
it sets up a Christ which is the creature of its own subjective 
thinking, over against and in place of the only true objective 
and historical Christ of the Gospel, "who is over all, God 
blessed forever. Amen." 

We are not to be put off here with words. Neither can we 
mince matters in so momentous a case. We reiterate our 
charge. The theology we are dragging into the light does not 
preach Christ, as the alpha and omega of the new creation, the 
beginning, middle, and end of the Gospel. It cannot stand the 
searching test of St, John. The Christ it talks about is not 



78 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



the Christ of the Incarnation, as He is made to pass before us 
in the sublime vision of the old Apostles' Creed ; as we hear 
Him proclaimed (Jesus and the Resurrection and the Second 
Advent), by St. Peter and St. Paul, in the Acts of the Apos- 
tles ; as we seem to see Him in the midst of the golden candle- 
sticks, looking forth upon us serenely and grandly from the ec- 
clesiastical literature of the first Christian ages. Not this, 
verily; as too many of us, alas, have been made painfully to 
feel ; but another form and visage altogether ; an object of 
thought rather than of faith, in looking to which we find that 
we have at last little more than our own thought to work with ; 
and become like those that feed on wind, in trying to replenish 
our souls with spiritualities which our souls have themselves 
produced, instead of the true bread which cometh down from 
heaven and alone giveth life unto the world. 

This is the great constitutional defect of the theology we are 
sitting in judgment upon ; a defect which any jury of plain 
Christian men can understand; and it is easy to see, to what 
consequences, in the end, it must necessarily lead. Where the 
Gospel is not apprehended as the historical, enduring,. objective 
Manifestation of God in the flesh, there can be no steady ap- 
prehension of that which constitutes the proper mystery of it in 
this view, namely, the union there is in it of the supernatu- 
ral with the natural in an abiding, historical (not magical) 
form. This precisely is the true object of all evangelical faith, 
in the New Testament sense; the objective power of salvation, 
through the apprehension of which only, faith becomes justify- 
ing and saving faith. Instead of this, we shall have the su- 
pernatural resolved into a spiritualistic presence, seated in the 
Holy Ghost, and made to reach into the minds of men directly 
from heaven, in no organic conjunction whatever with the In- 
carnation; this being considered as, at best, the outward occa- 
sion only, and in no sense the inward medium, of the commu- 
nication. In which case again, what is called justifying faith 
is no longer tied to the objective Gospel (without which, how- 
ever, it cannot be faith at all), but hugs simply the Gospel of 
this subjective assurance a man may have of God's mercy in 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



79 



his own mind, becoming thus, in fact, justification by fancy or 
feeling. But with the real supernatural of the Gospel meta- 
morphosed in this way into the general notion of the super- 
natural in a metaphysical view, the whole conception of Chris- 
tianity, in fact, sinks into the order of nature. The sense of 
what it is as a continuous constitution of grace, the historical 
presence of new heavenly powers, through the Spirit in the 
world, is gone." As with the Gnostics of old, the spiritual has 
lost all concrete, objective union with the natural. The bond 
between them has thinned itself into airy speculation. The 
system has become, in one word, essentially rationalistic. The 
virus of unbelief is in its veins; and it has no longer power to 
understand or appreciate fully, at a single point, the Mystery 
of Godliness, as it was seen of angels, preached to the nations, 
and believed on in the world, at the beginning. 

Hence, the trouble this unhistorical Christianity has every- 
where, with whatever comes before it as an assertion of ob- 
jective grace in the institutions of the Gospel. What is ex- 
hibited as thus transcending the order of life in its natural 
character, is set down at once for superstition. It is, of course, 
then, unchurchly. A Church in the sense of the Creed — the 
organ through which Christ works in the world (His body), 
the medium of His presence among men, the home of His Spirit, 
the sphere of His grace — is for it no object of faith what- 
ever, but an object rather of instinctive abhorrence and scorn. 
The office of the ministry flows in its view, not really, but only 
metaphorically, from Christ's Ascension Gift (Eph. iv: 8-12). 
Ordination is no investiture with a supernatural commission, 
proceeding from the Holy Ghost. Apostolical succession, in 
the case, is an idle dream. Sacraments, as such, are held to 
be a Romanizing abomination. For the spirit in question, the 
sacramental in truth, wherever it comes in its way, is a very 
Ithuriel's spear, the bare touch of which is enough to start it 
into its real shape, and make it appear the low rationalistic 
spirit which it is in fact. Sacraments are for it signs only of 
grace absent, and in no proper sense seals of grace present. 

That such a theology as this should have no sympathy with 



80 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



the true idea of worship in its liturgical form, results, as all can 
see, from its very constitution ; and that it should be found ar- 
rayed now against our new Liturgy, is nothing more than what 
was to be expected. The conflict in the case, as already said, 
is a conflict of theological systems ; not a controversy about a 
few responses, and a few outward forms (as the ridiculous fuss 
made in certain quarters about Ritualism in the German Re- 
formed Church might seem to imply), but a controversy about 
doctrines and articles of faith, that strikes far beyond the Ger- 
man Reformed Church into the 'life of the entire Evangelical 
Protestantism of this land. 

So much for the subject in its general view. The two oppos- 
ing schemes of divinity are before us in a contrasted form, 
which even plain people, it is trusted, may be able to under- 
stand ; if not with full scientific insight always at every point, 
yet with the insight, at least, of sound theological feeling, which 
is something far better. It remains now to notice briefly the 
theological objections made to the Liturgy at certain particular 
points. They will be found to resolve themselves at once into 
the general issue, between the two systems which have been 
thus far compared ; and with this in view, it will be very easy 
to see to what they amount. 

PARTICULAR OBJECTIONS. 

I. It has been objected at times to the Ordination Service 
(though we heard little of this at Dayton), that it makes too 
much of the derivation of the office of the Ministry, by histori- 
cal succession from Christ, and goes too far especially in say- 
ing, as it does p. 2^0, that the gift and grace of the Holy 
Ghost are to be looked for through the laying on of hands, for 
the fulfilment of its heavenly commission. 

But here the question at bottom is simply, whether the 
Church is to be regarded at all, or not, as an objective, histori- 
cal, more than merely natural constitution, carrying in itself 
powers and functions for its own ends, which are peculiar to 
itself, and not to be found anywhere else. Is it after all only 



OF TIIE NEW LITURGY. 



81 



like a Temperance Society or a Political Party? What 
business has it then among the faith mysteries of the Creed ? 

In the view of the Liturgy, the Church is an organization, as 
the Creed makes it to be, which is not simply human, but is, at 
the same time, also, superhuman, in virtue of its organic out- 
flow from the fountain head of all grace and truth in the world, 
the union of the divine and human in the Person of our Lord 
and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the mystery of the Incar- 
nation. The organization being such, must not its organs and 
functions be of a corresponding character? Is the Liturgy 
wrong in declaring the office of the ministry to be "of divine 
origin, and of truly supernatural character and force, flowing 
directly from the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as the fruit of 
His resurrection and triumphant ascension into heaven?" Is 
not this precisely what St. Paul teaches us, in the notable 
fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians? May the office 
come to any one, then, except from Christ, and through the 
order He has Himself established for handing it down in the 
Church? "The solemnity of ordination, then, through which 
this transmission flows," we are justified surely in saying with the 
Liturgy, " is not merely an impressive ceremony, by which the 
right of such as are called of God to the ministry, is owned 
and confessed by the Church ; but it is to be considered rather 
as their actual investiture with the very power of the office 
itself, the sacramental seal of their heavenly commission, and 
a symbolical assurance from on high, that their consecration to 
the service of Christ is accepted, and that the Holy Ghost will 
most certainly be with them in the faithful discharge of their 
official duties." 

Do we doubt this? Does it come as a strange, mystical, 
dangerously hierarchical doctrine to our ears ? Then must we 
question, to the same extent, the reality of any such order of 
grace in the world, as we profess to believe every time we re- 
peat the Creed. Ordination is a mere sham, indeed, if it be 
not the conveyance of power and right to exercise functions 
appertaining to the realm or jurisdiction in which it has place, 
as really as the commission of the civil magistrate is for him 
6 



82 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



an investiture with qualification lie would not otherwise possess, 
to act in the name of the government he represents. The com- 
mission in either case must have quality and force answerable 
to the order of authority it proceeds from ; and this being more 
than simply human and terrestrial in the case of the Gospel, it 
follows that the commission here must carry with it correspond- 
ing celestial character. Such being the case, it is only part of 
the faith which properly belongs to the transaction, when 
ordination is held to be the channel of supernatural official en- 
dowment for the work of the ministry ; and nothing can be 
more proper than that the candidate, having made good con- 
fession of his general faith previously, should have the ques- 
tion put to him finally: "Are you truly persuaded in your 
heart, that you are called of God to the office of the holy minis- 
try, and do you desire and expect to receive, through the lay- 
ing on of our hands, the gift and grace of the Holy Ghost, 
which shall enable you to fulfil this heavenly commission and 
trust?" 

It goes hard with the spiritualistic system, we know, to 
admit anything that looks to the real presence of the supernatural 
in this matter of fact way. The idea of grace tied to any 
outward occasion as such, the Holy Ghost bound to ordinances, 
is for it something heterogeneous with its ordinary conception of 
religion as an affair of purely subjective experience. It is felt 
to smack of mummery and superstition. Here, especially, 
comes in the bugbear of priestly manipulation and tactual suc- 
cession, so easy to be sneered at by the frivolous. But what 
mummery must it not be, in fact, to go through a form of this 
sort, without any belief in the reality of what it pretends to be ? 
To insist, that, while it seems to mean much, it means in truth 
in itself just nothing, and is only the sign of something alto- 
gether out of and beyond itself? If ordination be more than 
the powwowing of Pagan superstition, it must involve a real 
clothing with office in Christ's kingdom ; and this can come 
only from Himself through the Holy Ghost. Does the candi- 
date believe that, and look for it, in the transaction ? Do those 
who lay hands on Him expect it, and mean it in their own 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



83 



minds ? If not, what business have they to be mocking high 
heaven with their dumb show in this way ? 

II. Confession and Absolution. Exception is taken to the 
form in the Liturgy, by which the minister is directed, after 
the General Confession, to assure such as are truly penitent, 
that their sins are pardoned for Christ's sake (p. 10). It 
breathes, we are told, an odor of sacerdotalism; and serves to 
break the direct, immediate relation that should hold in the 
case between the believer and his Lord. 

Now, looking at the form itself, its terms certainly would 
seem to be safe enough in this view even for the most fastidi- 
ous Puritanic judgment. For they only say, in fact, what any 
one may say, and what all are bound to believe, of God's grace 
toward the penitent through the Gospel. "Unto as many of 
you, beloved brethren," the form runs, "as truly repent of 
your sins, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, with full pur- 
pose of new obedience," — to such and no others — "I announce 
and declare, by the authority and in the name of Christ" — not 
by my own or any other authority — "that your sins are for- 
given in heaven, according to His Gospel, through the perfect 
merit of Jesus Christ our Lord." Is there more in this at any 
time, than the declaration of what is at all times and in all 
places true? Does it imply that the minister himself pretends 
to forgive sins ? Does it not, in the strongest manner, say just 
the opposite ? What better is it then than spiritualistic pru- 
dery of the most captious sort, to put on a show of being 
scandalized with it in any such view? 

But there is more in the matter than this. The offence 
taken is, after all, with what lies deeper than the form. It is 
the instinctive working as before of the unchurchly spirit, 
against what is felt to come in its way here as the mediation 
of Divine favor through the Church. God only can forgive 
sins, it says with the Pharisees of old ; from Him only, there- 
fore, can we have the blessing in a direct spiritual way — His 
spirit touching our spirit, without any intervening medium; to 
conceive of any such instrumentation of His grace on the earth, 
is blasphemy and superstition. In other words, this Gnostic, 



84 



THELOGICAL VINDICATION 



rationalistic spirit eschews here, as at all other points, the mys- 
tery of an organic, objective, historical connection between 
the Church of Christ and the Holy Ghost; and refuses to ac- 
knowledge the Holy Ghost, the Divine in Christianity, unless 
in the form only of an intellectual abstraction, bound to the 
outward organization and order of the Church in no way what- 
ever. Of the " forgiveness of sins," in the sense of the Creed, 
where it is made to be a mystery for faith holding only in the 
bosom of the Holy Catholic Church, the spirit in question 
knows nothing. How should it? Have we not seen already 
that it is at war with the whole Creed? 

The acts of the Church, we have good reason to say, in the 
exercise of her proper functions, and through her proper organs, 
are never just the same thing with what might be done by a mere 
civil corporation presuming to act in the same way. To think or 
say so, would, indeed, be to blaspheme the Gospel. As official 
acts, they have in their own sphere a real force, answering to 
the character of the sphere, and being in fact the form in which 
its powers reach forward to their proposed end. Who will 
deny this ? No one, it might seem, but an infidel. 

Shall we be afraid then to say, that the official act of the min- 
ister, the organ of the Church, in blessing the people, or in 
pronouncing to the penitent the pardon of their sins, means 
something more than the same declarations would mean, made 
by some one else in an unofficial and common way? The minis- 
ter does not originate the pardon he pronounces ; neither does 
the Church; but the voice of the Church, nevertheless, uttered 
by him and through him, there where he stands in the objective 
bosom of this grace, may be and is of immense account for 
bearing the sense of it with full comfort into the believer's heart. 
If there are any who cannot see this, sustained as it is by the 
known relation of thought and word universally, and by analo- 
gies to be met with everywhere in common life, they are to be 
pitied for the narrowness of their thinking, rather than 
argued with seriously in so plain a case. 

III. We turn our attention next to the doctrine of the Lit- 
urgy in regard to Baptism. Exception is taken to it, as teach- 



/ OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



85 



ing baptismal regeneration, substituting a mechanical ceremony 
for the righteousness of faith, and making a mere outward 
form to stand for the work of the Holy Spirit. Let us see how 
the matter really stands. 

In somewhat bewildering contrast with this, the same service, 
which is thus charged with making too little of the sinner's 
justification, has been reproached for making a great deal too 
much of his original guilt and condemnation. Many at least, at 
the Synod at Dayton, could hardly trust their ears, when they 
heard a Professor of Theology, in the Keformed Church, say 
there, openly, that he, for his part, could not go with the Lit- 
urgy, where it speaks of deliverance of our children through 
baptism "from the power of the Devil;" he did not believe it 
to be so bad with the children of Christians naturally as that ; 
it was enough to appeal to the common sensibilities of parents 
(mothers in particular), to prove the contrary ! This sounds 
strange certainly; but it needs only a little reflection to per- 
ceive, that it is, after all, only the working out at a new point 
of the same false spiritualism, which finds it so hard to under- 
stand or acknowledge, on the other side, the presence of any 
real objective grace in baptism. 

The Professor of Theology referred to taught in this case, 
of course, blank Pelagiansism. Here precisely lay the old 
theological quarrel between Pelagius and St. Augustine. Pela- 
gius, appealing to the common sensibilities of human nature, 
would not allow that children are born into the world under the 
curse of original sin, which is the power of the Devil. St. Au- 
gustine maintained the contrary, and what is especially notice- 
able, confounded Pelagius most of all, by appealing to infant 
baptism, which could have no meaning, he said, except in the 
light of a deliverance from the curse of sin conceived of in this 
real way. So, we know, the Church, also, decided against the 
heresiarch and his followers ; and the decision has been echoed 
by the orthodoxy of the Christian world, from that day down 
to the present. We content ourselves with quoting now simply 
the plain words of the Heidelberg Catechism, the symbol this? 
Professor of Theology has bound himself as with the solemnity 



86 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



of an oath to teach. " By the fall and disobedience of our 
first parents, Adam and Eve, in Paradise," the Catechism tells 
us, Question 7, "our nature became so corrupt, that we are 
all conceived and born in sin." On this then follows the ques- 
tion: ' 'But are we so far depraved, that we are wholly unapt 
to any good (ganz unci gar untiiclitig zu einigem Guten), and 
prone to all evil?" to which is thundered forth, as from Mount 
Sinai, the soul-shaking answer: "Yes; unless we are born 
again by the Spirit of God." How this new birth by the 
Spirit is brought to pass, is not here of any account ; what we 
have to do with now is simply the witness of the Catechism to 
the total depravity of infants. It is plain, direct, overwhelm- 
ing. 

And is not this what we are taught no less plainly in the 
New Testament? "That which is born of the flesh," our 
Saviour says to Nicodemus (John iii. 6.) "is flesh" — that is, 
mere human nature in its fallen character, which as such can- 
not enter the kingdom of God, but is hopelessly on the out- 
side of that kingdom, and so under the power of the Devil; 
only "that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit;" and for this 
reason it is, that a man must be born again, "born of water 
and the Spirit," in order that he may have part in this salvation. 
But why pursue the argument in this way? Must we go about 
proving at length for elders and deacons, or for the people at 
large, in the German Reformed Church, that the Scriptures 
teach the doctrine of Original Sin? The very children in our 
Sunday-schools have a sounder theology on this subject, than 
the Divinity Professor, who so exposed himself in regard to it 
at the Synod in Dayton. 

A Pelagian anthropology leads over naturally to a spiritual- 
istic construction of the whole Christian salvation; in which, 
as there is no organic power of the Devil or kingdom of dark- 
ness, for men to be delivered from, so there will be no organic 
redemption either, no objective, historical order of grace, in 
the bosom and through the power of which, this salvation is 
to go forward; but all will be made to resolve itself into work- 
ings of God's Spirit that are of a general character, and into 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



87 



processes of thought and feeling, on the part of men, with 
no other basis than the relations of God to man in the most com- 
mon, simply humanitarian view. Is there then no organic re- 
demption needed for men, into the sphere of which they must 
come first of all, in order that they may have power to become 
personally righteous, and so be able to work out their salva- 
tion with fear and trembling, as knowing it to be God that 
worketh in them both to will and to do of His own good pleas- 
sure? Has the Church been wrong in believing through all 
ages, that a we must be delivered from the power of darkness, 
and translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son" (Col. i. 
13), not as the end of our personal goodness and piety, but the 
beginning of it, and the one necessary condition first of all, 
without which we can make no progress in goodness or piety 
whatever? Has the Church been wrong in believing, that such 
change of state, such transplantation from the kingdom of the 
Devil over into the kingdom of Christ, must in the nature of 
the case be a Divine act : and that as such a Divine act, it must 
be something more than any human thought or volition sim- 
ply, stimulated into action by God's Spirit? Has the Church 
been wrong in believing, finally, that the Sacrament of Holy Bap- 
tism, the sacrament of initiation into the Church, was insti- 
tuted, not only to signify this truth in a general way, but to 
seal it as a present actuality for all who are willing to accept 
the boon thus offered to them in the transaction ? 

. Baptismal regeneration ! our evangelical spiritualists are at 
once ready to exclaim. But we will not allow ourselves to be put 
out of course in so solemn an argument, by any catchword of 
this sort addressed to popular prejudice. The Liturgy avoids 
the ambiguous phrase ; and we will do so too ; for the word re- 
generation is made to mean, sometimes one thing, and some- 
times another, and it does not come in our way at all at pre- 
sent to discuss these meanings. We are only concerned, that 
no miserable logomachy of this sort shall be allowed to cheat 
us out of what the sacrament has been held to be in past ages ; 
God's act, setting apart those who are the subjects of it to His 
service, and bringing them within the sphere of His grace in 



88 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



order that they may be saved. "We do not ask any one to call 
this regeneration ; it may not suit at all his sense of the term ; 
but we do most earnestly conjure all to hold fast to the thing, 
call it by what term they may. The question is simply, 
Doth baptism in any sense save us ? That is, does it put us 
in the way of salvation? Has it anything to do at all with 
our deliverance from original sin, and our being set down in 
the new world of righteousness and grace, which has been 
brought to pass, in the midst of Satan's kingdom all around 
it, by our Lord Jesus Christ? 

For the defence of the Liturgy it will be enough to place 
the matter now on the lowest ground. Our spiritualists ad- 
mit that God may make baptism the channel of His grace — 
may cause the thing signified to go along with the outward 
sign, when He is pleased to do so ; only they will not have it 
that His grace is in any way bound to the ordinance. Will 
they not admit then also, that the sacrament ought to be so used 
as to carry with it the benefit it represents ; that God designed 
it to be in this way more than an empty form ; and that it is 
the duty of all, therefore, to desire and expect through it what 
it thus, by Divine appointment, holds out to expectation? Who 
will be so bold as to say, in so many words, that baptism means 
no deliverance whatever from the power of sin, and that it is 
superstition to come looking for anything of this sort from it? 
Why then quarrel with the Liturgy for making earnest with 
the objective force of the sacrament in this view? 

"You present this child here," it is said, "and do seek for 
him deliverance from the power of the Devil, the remission of 
sin, and the gift of a new and spiritual life by the Holy Ghost, 
through the Sacrament of Baptism, which Christ hath ordained 
for the communication of such great grace." Is it not true, 
that the sacrament has been ordained for that purpose, even if 
this be not exclusively or necessarily bound to its administra- 
tion? If not, for what other purpose under heaven was it 
ordained? And if for this purpose, why should those who 
come to the ordinance, not come seeking what it holds out in 
this way to the view of faith? Are they to come seeking 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



89 



nothing, expecting nothing, believing nothing? Or if other- 
wise, in the name of all common sense, tell us, 0 ye Gnostic 
dreamers, ye zealous contenders against formalities and forms, 
what then are they to seek ? 

The Liturgy, we allow, however, goes beyond this low view 
of the mere possibility of grace through the sacrament; it 
affirms that God, on His part, makes it to be always objectively 
just what it means. In other works, it teaches the reality of 
sacramental grace; and sees in it a birth-right title to all the 
blessings of the new covenant. This does not mean, that it 
regenerates or converts any one in the modern Methodistic 
sense of these terms ; that it saves people by magic ; or that it 
makes their final salvation sure in any way. Like Esau's 
birthright, it may be neglected, despised, parted with for a 
mess of pottage. But all this does not touch the question of 
its intrinsic value, in its own order; as being a real Divine gift 
and power of Sonship, nevertheless, in the family of God, for 
which all the treasures of the earth should be counted a poor 
and mean exchange. 

On this subject of baptismal grace, then, we will enter into 
no compromise with the anti-liturgical theology we have now 
in hand. In seeking to make the Liturgy wrong, it has only 
shown itself wrong; and the more its errors are probed, the 
more are they found to be indeed, " wounds, and bruises, and 
putrefying sores." Starting with Pelagianism on one side, it 
lands us swiftly' in downright Rationalism on the other. 4 4 It 
is' impossible," says the distinguished French Reformed divine, 
Pressense, in a late article, "to establish the necessity of in- 
fant baptism, except upon the ground that baptism imparts a 
special grace." We are most decidedly of the same opinion; 
and for this reason we denounce this theology as in reality, 
whatever it may be in profession, hostile to infant baptism, and 
unfriendly, therefore, to the whole idea of educational religion 
as this has been based upon it in the Reformed Church from 
the beginning. Without the conception of baptismal grace 
going along with the baptism of infants, there can be no room 
properly for confirmation ; and the catechetical training which 



90 



HISTORICAL VINDICATION 



is employed to prepare the way for this, may easily come then 
to seem a hinclerance rather than a help, to the true conversion 
of the young to God. Then it will be well, if baptism fall not 
into general contempt, and so be brought to sink finally more 
and more into neglect altogether. To what a pass things have 
already come in this respect throughout our country, by rea- 
son of the baptistic spirit which is among us, and the general 
theological tendency we are now considering, we will not now 
take time to decide. Those who have eyes to see, can see for 
themselves. 

IV. Office for the Holy Communion. The central char- 
acter of this service, ruling as it ought to do the whole 
Order of worship to which it belongs, must make it of course 
specially objectionable to the anti-liturgical spirit with which 
we are now dealing. 

Particular fault has sometimes been found with the con- 
secratory prayer in the service, as teaching a real union be- 
tween Christ and the elements representing His body and 
blood, differing altogether from the proper Reformed doctrine 
on this mysterious subject. A certain Doctor of Divinity went 
so far at Dayton as to say, that it amounted in full to the Ro- 
man Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. But in this the 
Doctor of Divinity was egregiously mistaken, as in many 
things besides. The doctrine of the Liturgy in that prayer 
is not Popish, and not Lutheran, but strictly Reformed. Not 
to be sure Reformed in the modern Puritan sense, in which too 
plainly this unliturgical spirit finds its familiar home ; but Re- 
formed in the old Calvinistic sense, as this entered into the sym- 
bols of the Reformed Church generally in the sixteenth century. 

It is not true that this proper Reformed doctrine made the 
Lord's Supper to be only a commemorative ordinance, call- 
ing to mind the fact of His death. It made it to be this; but 
it made it to be also the medium of a realmystical communion 
with this glorified life. It saw in it, not a sign only, but a sac- 
rament; the conjunction of visible elements with the invisible 
represented by them, in such sort that the presence of the one 
could be said to involve the presence also of the other — not 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



91 



locally of course, but dynamically and with full virtue and effect 
— through the wonder-working power of the Holy Ghost. This 
we have abundantly shown years ago in our tract against Dr. 
Hodge, entitled, "The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on 
the Presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper;" an argument, 
which no one has ever yet pretended to meet, and whose historical 
force at least never can be overthrown; however convenient it 
may be for Puritanic divinity to go on repeating its tradition- 
ary song on this subject, as though history had nothing do with 
the matter whatever. 

Now it is this old Reformed doctrine, we affirm, and no 
other, which is involved in the consecratory prayer of the Lit- 
urgy. Any one at all familiar with the Calvinistic terminol- 
ogy in regard to it, can see that it is faithfully followed at every 
point. It would be hard, indeed, to give the doctrine more 
succinctly or exactly in the same compass. God is called upon 
to "send down the powerful benediction of His Holy Spirit" 
upon the elements, " that being set apart now from a common 
to a sacred and mystical use, they may exhibit and represent" 
— these being the very terms made use of by Calvin to distin- 
guish the Reformed doctrine from the Lutheran ; may exhibit 
and represent " to us with true effect" — that is, not corporeally, 
and yet not simply in sign or shadow either, but with the 
energy of actual presence — " the Body and Blood of His Son, 
Jesus Christ; so that in the use of them" — mark again the 
distinction ; not in the elements themselves outwardly con- 
sidered, but in the use of them, that is, in the sacramental 
transaction, "we may be made, through the power of the Holy 
Ghost " — again the Calvinistic or Reformed qualification — 
"to partake really and truly of His blessed life, whereby only 
we can be saved from death, and raised to immortality at the 
last day." 

In the face of all this, what are we to think of a Doctor of 
Divinity, who could stand up and say, that the Liturgy in this 
prayer teaches the doctrine of transubstantiation ? 

What are we to think of the same Doctor of Divinity, when 
we find him thrumming on the expression, " this memorial of 



92 



THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION 



the blessed sacrifice of Thy Son," in the next following prayer; 
as though it said memorial sacrifice, and meant all that is held 
offensive in the Roman Catholic so called sacrifice of the mass ! 
Alas, alas, for the Liturgy, in the hands of theological criticism 
so utterly untheological as this ! 

A truce, however, to these quibbles about particular terms. 
The real controversy here is with the Communion service as a 
whole ; and it turns upon the sacramental doctrine which un- 
derlies it throughout, and which in this way conditions the 
universal sense of the Liturgy. This anti-liturgical theology, 
not centering in the Incarnation, not dwelling in the bosom of 
the Creed, having no sense for objective historical Christianity, 
and no sense for the Church, can have at the same time of 
course no sense for the sacramental in its true form. For what 
is a sacrament t The visible exhibition of an invisible grace — 
a mystery in this view, where the visible and invisible are 
brought together, and held together, not simply in man's 
thought, but in God's power, by a bond holding beyond nature 
altogether in the supernatural order of grace. Does Puritan- 
ism believe this? Not at all. It will know no sacrament, save 
in the intelligible form of a sign, which simply represents and 
calls to mind what God does for men spiritually, and on the 
outside of the sacrament altogether. AYe have just seen what 
becomes of the Sacrament of Baptism in the hands of this 
spiritualistic scheme. And now it is only what might be ex- 
pected, to find it bent on taking away our Lord from us after 
the same fashion, in the Holy Eucharist. 

The Liturgy stands as a protest and defence against this 
sacrilege. It gives us the true Reformed view of Christ's pres- 
ence in the Lord's Supper, in a form answering at the same 
time to the faith and worship of the Primitive Church. It 
teaches, that the Lord's Supper is more than an outward sign, 
and more than a mere calling to mind of our Saviour's death 
as something past and gone. It teaches, that the value of 
Christ's sacrifice never dies, but is perennially continued in the 
power of His life. It teaches, that the outward side of the 
sacrament is mystically bound by the Holy Ghost to its inward 



OF THE NEW LITURGY. 



93 



invisible side ; not fancifully, but really and truly ; so that the 
undying power of Christ's life and sacrifice are there, in the 
transaction, for all who take part in it with faith. It teaches, 
that it is our duty to appropriate this grace, and to bring it be- 
fore God (the "memorial of the blessed sacrifice of His Son"), 
as the only ground of our trust and confidence in His presence. 
All this the Liturgy teaches. Who will say that it wrongs, in 
doing so, the sacramental doctrine of the Reformed Church? 
Are we then to have no sacraments? Must we plunge into 
the full abyss of Rationalism? 

We now stop. Our general task is done. Enough has been 
said, to show how things stand between the New Liturgy and 
its theological opposers. We are willing to submit the case to 
the common intelligence of our churches. Even the West must 
yet come, we think, to see eye to eye here with the East. 
To the people at large we say: Look now on this picture, and 
now on that ; and judge ye for your own selves, which of these 
theological schemes may be safest and best for the German Re- 
formed Church to take to her bosom at the present time. 



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